MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The common cause
RICHARD MURGATROYD welcomes the modern relevance of a history of the expropriation of common lands for private profit
LANDMARK PROTEST: 80th anniversary of of the 1932 Mass Trespass in the Peak District: Singer and broadcaster Mike Harding (centre), flanked by (from left to right) Kate Ashbrook, President of the Ramblers; Dame Fiona Reynolds Director General of the National Trust; Broadcaster Stuart Maconie and Harry Rothman, son of trespass leader Benny Rothman
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
The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
By Ian Angus
Monthly Review Press, New York, £18.99
A GOOD history book makes you think about the present.
On the day I finished Ian Angus’s The War Against the Commons I visited my local station ticket office. The queue was long and I had time to look around and reflect. Once all this great building, this marvel of engineering, this vital service, had been publicly owned, part of the modern “commons.” Even now in its privatised state there remained some good elements – like the expert and helpful staff in the ticket office which the train-lords and rentier bankers were planning to evict!
So, Angus’s book is timely indeed.
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