Eric Hobsbawm, among the most pre-eminent and valued Marxist historians of the late twentieth century, frequently reviewed for the London Review of Books. Here, a prominent British author does a dig into some of Hobsbawm’s many signal LRB essays.
John le Carré died Saturday at eighty-nine. His novels rejected the glamor and ritz of Cold War–era spy fiction. Instead, he portrayed espionage as a dreary, disturbing machine that ground up innocents for a goal that didn’t justify the human cost.
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Criticism of Israeli policies and expressions of Palestine solidarity, while always to some degree controversial, had long been part of acceptable political discourse on the British left-of-center. That is no longer the case.
South African freedom fighters here respond to the purge of Jeremy Corbyn from membership in Britain's Labour Party last week, over charges that he is anti-Semitic. The purge was reversed this week by the party's National Executive Committee.
The British abolished slavery decades before it ended in the United States, but racism still pervades the United Kingdom’s everyday life. The essay below looks at how and why.
Many have attempted to claim that `things are better here' for black people than in the US. This ignores both Europe's colonial past and its own racist present.
A British cruise ship in distress this week turned to the US government for help and was refused. Cuba acted without self-interest. The ship had been anchored in the Caribbean over the last five days as it frantically searched for a place to dock.
Hilary Mantel concludes her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, preceded by Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies , brilliantly and exhaustively charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of Henry V!!!
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