Smiley’s People Wouldn’t Survive This
Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
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Ryan’s Second Strike is a taut, post-Brexit techno-thriller in which privatised warfare meets Cold War ghosts, and the real enemy is the story you’re told to believe.
Geoff Dyer’s Homework shows childhood not as innocence, but as class training—plastic toys, unwritten rules, and a welfare state already fraying at the edges.
Britain doesn’t need a softer Starmer or a greener liberalism—it needs a new party of revolutionary ecosocialism, built by those brave enough to walk out and fight for class power, not manage its decline.
They say prisons are overcrowded, as if the cages are too small. As if the problem is spatial. As if all we need is a few more acres of razor wire and reinforced concrete and the crisis will vanish. But prisons aren’t full because we lack space. They’re full because we lack imagination.
Nigel Farage isn’t the voice of the working class—he’s their grifter-in-chief, selling tax cuts to the comfortable while Labour trails behind him, too timid to name the real enemy.
On Jane Borden’s Cults Like Us
I picked up A Colossal Wreck because the 1990s and early 2000s feel more relevant by the day. There’s a
Paul W. Schroeder was no Marxist, but in an age of collapsing empires and revived realpolitik, his cold-eyed history of diplomacy offers the left a theory of ruin we can use
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin and Enzo Traverso’s Revolution: An Intellectual History
Tony Benn was not a relic of a lost left but a constitutional insurrectionist whose writings—on the Crown, industry, war, and tradition—still offer a blueprint for democratic rebellion in a Britain built to resist it.
In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean argues that capitalism isn’t simply in crisis, it’s decomposing into a new neofeudal order of rent, servitude and fragmented power.
In Mythocracy, Yves Citton argues that the left must learn to fight not just with facts or programmes, but with stories that shape the atmosphere of power itself.
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn (Verso, 2024)
This review explores how Richard Beck’s Homeland and Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly reveal the profound domestic and global consequences of America’s response to 9/11, from creeping authoritarianism at home to declining influence abroad.