SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
Raymond Williams at 100
Described as ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’ in his time, read him today a century after his birth and you will never see the world the same way again, writes NICK MATTHEWS
Raymond Williams with Frank Kermode, Cambridge, 1981
Morning Star international editor ROGER McKENZIE says Trump’s ceaseless belligerence is a desperate effort to prevent the emergence of a multilateral world
Don’t dismiss Lebanon as a side theatre of this war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN — there are signs Israel has expansion in mind, and it has demonstrated its willingness to expel and kill whole populations
The media present Starmer as staying out of Trump’s war — but we’re already deeply involved in a conflict that sees the US and Israel kill civilians on a huge scale, argues IAN SINCLAIR
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on this week’s conference unveiling the findings of the Gaza Tribunal established by Jeremy Corbyn
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
“AHEAD were the Black Mountains and we climbed among them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls, beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven back. To the east along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman Castles; to the west the fortress wall of the mountains.”
This is from the first paragraph of Raymond Williams’s seminal essay, Culture is Ordinary, written in 1958, his rebuttal to those at Cambridge University who saw “culture” as something to be acquired by the upper classes.
We were on a pilgrimage to see the Border Country that had shaped Raymond Williams’s worldview. We stopped for lunch at the Old Pandy Inn. Not for the pub or its excellent menu but to see what remained of Pandy railway station. It was closed in 1958 and explains why Raymond had caught the bus in his essay.
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