MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Breaking the circle
NICK WRIGHT recommends a biography of the anti-fascist who passed secrets to the Soviets which challenges conventional accounts
CRITICAL JUNCTURE : John Cairncross’s information proved crucial to Soviet forces (pictured) at the Balttle of Kursk
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Agent Moliere: The Life of John Cairncross, the Fifth Man of the Cambridge Spy Circle
by Geoff Andrews
(Bloomsbury, £20)
THE ANTI-FASCIST endeavours of the bourgeois spies for the Comintern — the Communist International — before, during and after the second world war continue to grip the imagination.
A whole industry is devoted to the analysis of their personalities, principally to find character flaws that explain their deviant political views and “traitorous” behaviour, while much of the writing is designed to defend the “incompetent” security organs of the bourgeois state from criticism or to serve an anti-communist narrative.
More from this author
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
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RON JACOBS welcomes the long overdue translation of an epic work that chronicles resistance to fascism during WWII
JOHN GREEN surveys the remarkable career of screenwriter Malcolm Hulke and the essential part played by his membership of the Communist Party
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK relishes a collection of cartoons that focus on Palestine from the period 1917 to 1948
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany