Autumn in Kyiv
September 6th, 2025: On Shevchenko Boulevard, plums are being sold by old women clad in anoraks and scarves in spite of the September sun. Every time I come to Kyiv, I can sense the mood of the nation through the military posters. Female soldiers are more prominent this time and there are images of soldiers […]
Fascism in America
The ghost of Karl Marx is haunting America again. This time it is galvanising a far-right revolution that has traumatised everyone in America (with the likely exception of those inside the MAGA movement) and shocked people elsewhere who thought they ‘knew’ America. This includes those of us who have lived, studied and worked there and […]
The Monad Unchained
The Nazis conducted their genocide in secret, and took pains to ensure that this secrecy would survive the war. After the failed prisoner uprising of August 2nd, 1943 – when it was already clear to every sentient German that the war was as good as lost – the SS set about dismantling the death factory […]
Spurning the Dust
Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, by Maurice J Casey, Footnote Press, 404 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-804440995 Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International, by Brigitte Studer, Verso Books, 496 pp, £30, ISBN: 978-1839768019 American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, by Julia L […]
The Case for the State
The largely successful growth of the world economy since 1945, which has seen hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty and continuing scientific and technological development, has been based on a system of multilateral global governance developed in the aftermath of World War II. That system of governance, which has been taken for […]
The Nightmare of Gaza
You have been watching for fifteen months now the annihilation of Gaza? You have witnessed the ceaseless cascade of images of desperate families clawing massacred relatives from under astounding mountains of rubble? You have caught glimpses of people scooping body parts into white plastic bags? You have witnessed the shattered shells of what once were […]