ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Latest editorial
Radical insights into how we make history
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
A Radical History of the World
by Neil Faulkner
(Pluto Press, £14.99)
HISTORY, in our frenetic times, is increasingly seen as one damned thing after another. Not so with Neil Faulkner’s epic treatment, based on his Marxist understanding that mankind makes its own history but not under conditions of its own choosing.
In adopting a holistic approach, Faulkner provides an alternative to the received historical record, with his book ranging from the earliest appearance of hominins, our human forebears, to the present.
Similar stories
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes, with reservations, a scholarly addition to the unfinished business of understanding how capital works on a world scale
STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from
MARJORIE MAYO recommends a disturbing book that seeks to recover traces of the past that have been erased by Israeli colonialism