Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER

EIGHTY years ago, on February 2 1943, the Soviet Union’s sustained defence of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), ended with the surrender of 91,000 soldiers of the German 6th Army under General von Paulus.
The battle for the city had raged since the previous September. The figures of human losses, unpublicised, besides German prisoners of war, were, for Germany, almost 150,000 and for the Soviet Union were around half a million.
The Nazi failure to win the struggle for Stalingrad, and to advance in the south to the oil producing centres of Grozny and Baku, represented a huge setback for Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, launched on June 22 1941.

The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON

JOHN ELLISON looks back at Labour’s opportunistic tendency, when in office, to veer to the right on policy as well as ideological worldview

JOHN ELLISON recalls the momentous role of the French resistance during WWII
