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
WITH the government’s chaotic handling of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, suddenly announcing changes late at night on Twitter, the attractiveness of a summer break in Britain, for those still able to afford it, has more attraction than usual.
The August weather is notoriously unreliable, but for socialists there is a chance to visit some of the locations that Marx and Engels enjoyed in the second half of the 19th century.
Not quite all are by the sea. There are references in the correspondence to Buxton, then a major spa town, and within reach of Manchester, for example.
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT



