MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The north African struggle
JOE GILL welcomes a helpful, if incomplete, guide to the the native and Islamic struggles against imperial and colonial powers in north Africa
UNDESERVEDLY OVERLOOKED: Abd el-Krim, Moroccan political and military leader and the president of the Republic of the Rif (1921-1926) during an interview with Luis de Oteyza for the "La Libertad" journal, January 1925
[Jose Maria Diaz Casariego/CC] 
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 Maghreb Since 1800: A Short History
Knut S Vikor, Hurst, £19.99
AS AUTHOR Knut S Vikor says in his introduction, the term “Middle East” was a British colonial invention, covering the region controlled by the British empire from Egypt to Iraq and the Arab Gulf.
The Arabic names for the region that became united under the Islamic Caliphate are much older: it was divided into the Maghreb (where the sun sets) to the west, and the Mashriq (where the sun rises) to the east. The Maghreb extends from the Western Sahara and Morocco in the west to Libya’s eastern border with Egypt in the east.
The present-day division between the southern Mediterranean and its northern shores — the fortress Europe where thousands die each year trying to reach Spain or Italy — came about half a millennium ago when the Spanish crown expelled Muslims and Jews in 1492, and the Ottomans gradually extended their hold on north Africa westward to Tunis and Algiers.
Similar stories
We must remember Morocco’s land grab of the Sahrawi people’s territory continues with French and British support, writes BERT SCHOUWENBURG, looking into the origins of the annexation
The revolutions in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso against the old colonial powers are seldom understood in terms of Africans’ own agency and their rejection of the imperialist humiliation thrust upon them, writes ROGER McKENZIE
BOB NEWLAND applauds a demonstration of the existence of a substantial African history that contributed much to world development long before European colonialism
