Tag: History

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

Published in New English Weekly, 21 March 1940 It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and… Read More George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

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Book review: Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past

One of the unfortunate temptations of the Trump era has been the rush to find radical breaks with the past where, in truth, the lines of continuity are strong. The themes of Trump’s speech were already well circulated among the Anglo-American elite, whether in the work of the political scientist Samuel Huntington or in the… Read More Book review: Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past

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Book review – 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

Vladimir Nabokov – one of Stepanova’s many literary companions in In Memory of Memory – once wrote: “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”     Years ago, Maria Stepanova visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to do… Read More Book review – 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

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Deathbed Letter From Former Cop Claims NYPD, FBI Helped Kill Malcolm X

A letter shared by the family of a deceased former New York police officer alleges that the officer, the New York City Police Department and the FBI played a role in the murder of the powerful civil rights leader Malcolm X. The outspoken antiracism activist and former spokesman for the Nation of Islam died on… Read More Deathbed Letter From Former Cop Claims NYPD, FBI Helped Kill Malcolm X

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“Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu

The following conversation took place in December 2020. On the occasion of Jairus Banaji’s latest publication, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew B. Liu spoke to contextualize his work within a multi-decade trajectory of history, theory, and labor organization, across Europe and Asia. We noted the particular significance of an original intervention… Read More “Where is the working class? It’s all over the world today”: Jairus Banaji in conversation with Sheetal Chhabria and Andrew Liu

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Book review: The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921

The Allied victory in the First World War was won on the back of the labour of non-combatant ‘coolies’, whose deployment allowed for swift mobilisation across fronts. A new book narrates the story of their struggles on the battlefields and of their neglect. Radhika Singha, The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921… Read More Book review: The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921

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Chakshu Roy: Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law

‘And then again there are such as consider it virtuous to say, “Virtue is necessary”; but at bottom they believe only that the police is necessary’: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.    Indian Governments past and present have used a colonial-era law to charge many more ‘seditious’ men and women, most recently during the farmer… Read More Chakshu Roy: Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law

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Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev – Putinism and the oil-boom years

The war in eastern Ukraine, rumbling into life once more after the collapse of an unsteady ceasefire, has created a widening breach between Russia and the west, with relations now worse than they have been in decades. In Russia, the hardening of the domestic consensus behind Putin has been helped along by the media’s increasingly strident nationalism, and by a… Read More Book review: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev – Putinism and the oil-boom years

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Book review – Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

While Mary Wollstonecraft earned her place at the table for pioneering women in Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party (1974–9), she would not be everyone’s ideal guest. She has a reputation as an acerbic killjoy. She deemed novels to be the ‘spawn of idleness’. She did not embrace women in sisterhood but censured them for their… Read More Book review – Mary Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

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