Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Radical insights into how we make history
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
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.
Breathtaking in its scope and exhaustive research it is highly readable as it explores the interplay of natural, geographical, technological and sociological factors that provide the circumstances in which, and through which, mankind can forge its destiny. Yet these have been contested by the political systems under which men and women have laboured.
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GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
