As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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
While Trump threatens to send Haitian gang leaders to El Salvador's terror prison, DANNY SHAW reveals how these paramilitary groups are merely symptoms of US-backed neocolonial rule — the real terrorists are the CIA and international actors arming desperate youth to traumatise an unarmed population
Having endured 14 years of Tory austerity followed by Starmerite cuts, young voters are desperate for change — but Anas Sarwar’s refusal to differentiate from Westminster means Scottish Labour risks electoral catastrophe, writes LAUREN HARPER
Mark Harvey pays tribute to a veteran of the days when the London building trade was a hotbed of working-class struggle, a legendary trade unionist, communist and poet
Rather than hoping for the emergence of some new ‘party of the left,’ EMMA DENT COAD sees a broad alliance of local parties and community groups as a way of reviving democratic progressive politics
ANSELM ELDERGILL draws attention to a legal case on Tuesday in which a human rights group is challenging the government’s decision to allow the sale of weapons used against Palestinians
The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine, writes PAWEL WARGAN
“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.
More from this author
The government needs to raise its game when it comes to the tech giants who behave like the robber barons of old, argues NICK MATTHEWS
NICK MATTHEWS looks at the great Bolshevik leader’s intense three-week period of furious study in the British Library in 1908 and the timeless classic on Marxism and philosophy it produced: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
NICK MATTHEWS recommends a vivacious blend of classical and traditional Cuban music that brings swing to Mozart
NICK MATTHEWS looks back to the historic 14-week dispute which was to form a significant early test for the then-recently formed Transport and General Workers Union
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PHIL KATZ applauds the biography of a man of principle that is a vibrant excavation of the radical tradition itself
‘There's outrage aplenty in this production but we never quite get to the dark night of the soul,’ writes WILL STONE
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Better Man, How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, Mufasa: The Lion King, Dolphin Boy
NICK MATTHEWS welcomes the Communist Party of Britain’s commitment to culture and suggests that the Victorian critic points the way toward combining social function with beauty