ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Essays on the role of intellectuals in a conflicted contemporary world
Noam Chomsky
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
WHAT or who is an intellectual? If you were to go by a Guardian listing of the top 300 British intellectuals, which includes the likes of Michael Gove, then the term might appear meaningless.
In this short book of essays, marking the half century since Noam Chomsky’s powerful anti-Vietnam war article with the same title in the New York Review of Books, Nicholas Allot defines the intellectual as applying to those privileged to have the “training in reading texts critically, looking up sources … and the time and job security to be able to do so in the sustained way that it takes to expose the lies of the state and other powerful agents.”
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RICHARD SHILLCOCK examines an enjoyable, but philosophically conventional book, and urges Marxists to employ their capacity to embrace the totality in any explanation
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
ROGER McKENZIE expounds on the motivation that drove him to write a book that anticipates a dawn of a new, fully liberated Africa – the land of his ancestors
As Trump targets universities while Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem redefines habeas corpus as presidential deportation power, STEPHEN ARNELL traces how John Scopes’s optimism about academic freedom’s triumph now seems tragically premature