MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
A remarkable life
MARJORIE MAYO is enthralled by a new biography of the Martiniquan anti-colonialist and psychiatrist
REVOLUTIONARY: Frantz Fanon (standing sixth from left) and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956
[Public Domain] 
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
Frantz Fanon
by James S Williams, Reaktion Books £12.99
FRANTZ FANON (1925-1961) was a phenomenon, as this new biography sets out to explain.
In his short life (cut off by leukaemia at the age of 36) Fanon had been a soldier, fighting fascism in the second world war, a militant in North Africa during the Algerian war of Independence (1954-1962), an innovative psychiatrist, an ambassador, a journalist, a pan-Africanist internationalist and one of the most influential thinkers on anti-colonialism of his time.
Growing up in colonial Martinique, Fanon imbibed the assumption that French education would enable black students from the colonies, like himself, to become assimilated – and to think of themselves as being culturally white. He was only to discover the reality of racism when he reached France and experienced this for himself.
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MARJORIE MAYO welcomes challenging insights and thought-provoking criticisms of a number of widely accepted assumptions on the left
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These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
