MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The forensics of liberating the past
MARJORIE MAYO praises a narrative about the very different ways in which the past is being revisited and reinterpreted in India today
Madan Lal Dhingra’s statue in Amritsar, India
[Vengolis/Creative Commons] 
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
Exhumation: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra
By Leena Dhingra
Small Axes £12.99
THIS is a story with very particular contemporary relevance, given the cultural wars that are being waged by the far right at the present time.
How to face up to Britain’s colonial past? How to make sense of competing ways of remembering? And how to take account of the implications for those involved in contemporary struggles against racism and religious intolerance?
Exhumation tells the story of Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian freedom fighter who was convicted of assassinating a British official and accordingly hanged in 1909 at Pentonville Prison.
More from this author
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes challenging insights and thought-provoking criticisms of a number of widely accepted assumptions on the left
MARJORIE MAYO recommends a disturbing book that seeks to recover traces of the past that have been erased by Israeli colonialism
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
These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
