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MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The perfect vade mecum for existing and would-be socialists
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
Socialism: A Very Short Iintroduction
By Michael Newman
Oxford University Press, £8.99
Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series provides exactly that: brief but comprehensive coverage of the topic under consideration. These guides provide excellent resources for students – and indeed for anyone who wants to gain a critical overview of the area in question.
Michael Newman’s Socialism: A Very Short Introduction offers precisely this type of initiation to the study of socialism - this fully updated and revised version explaining the history of socialist ideas and their relevance for today and tomorrow.
The coverage is comprehensive despite the book’s deceptively small size. Having defined socialism, the discussion moves on to outline the main current of socialist thought, from the utopian socialists, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier through to anarchist traditions and on to Marx and Engels and subsequent debates within Marxism.
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
