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
READING and Rebellion, an anthology of radical writing for children compiled by Kimberley Reynolds, Jane Rosen and Michael Rosen is, the latter says: “The first attempt to try to recapture both the publications, in many forms, and a sense of what it was like to read, sing or perform them.”
And what many and various forms they are and what lives they reflect and touched.
As might be expected, the Communist Party is a key player — Rosen (M) again: “One of my favourite (childhood) books was A White Sail Gleams by Russian writer Valentin Katayev. How did an English child living in a flat over a shop in the London suburbs come to be reading this Russian book? The answer at one level is simple, my parents were members of the British Communist Party.”
At the very moment Britain faces poverty, housing and climate crises requiring radical solutions, the liberal press promotes ideologically narrow books while marginalising authors who offer the most accurate understanding of change, writes IAN SINCLAIR
JAMIE TUCKNUTT reports on an initiative that brings together two epochs of the city’s anti-fascist struggles
This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH



