MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Best of 2019: Books
LEST WE FORGET: Stalingrad after the battle
[Sergey Strunnikov] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
WHAT must be one of the outstanding events in the book publishing year was the first English edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Victor Grossman’s Stalingrad, a kind of prequel to his magnificent Life and Fate.
Grossman was throughout the second world war a special correspondent for Red Army newspaper The Red Star and was posted in 1942 to the armageddon of Stalingrad, the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war.
More than simply a novel or history, this symphonic work captures the day-to-day desperate struggle for survival by soldiers and civilians alike.
There is no glamorisation in Grossman’s merging of cinematographic detail with a poetic prose that captures the pain, hope, love and seemingly impossible resilience of humanity at the extreme.
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GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
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GORDON PARSONS recommends a gripping account of flawed justice in the case of Pinochet and the Nazi fugitive Walther Rauff
