Andy Beckett’s The Searchers, about Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell, is out in paperback.
Whenever Britain is about to bomb another country, or is openly considering it, an old video will start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons in 1998, back in the distant days of New Labour, of which he was a frequent critic. Tony Blair’s government was seeking parliamentary approval to...
Close to the end of Bruce Chatwin’s celebrated, cryptic, not completely reliable book In Patagonia, published in 1977, there is a short passage about a resident of what was then the remotest city in Chile, near South America’s cold and windy tip. In a book made up of terse, sometimes haunted fragments, this passage is the most unsettling by some distance. ‘There is a man...
On 30 September 2001, Tariq Ali was arrested at Munich airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel...
In this first episode of a new strand in the LRB Podcast, host James Butler talks to former Labour MP and minister Chris Mullin, columnist Andy Beckett and journalist Morgan Jones about whether Labour...
Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany....
Labour moves right when the economy is doing well and there’s money to spend, then left when the economy looks to be in crisis and structural reform is needed. Structural reform is certainly needed today.
The fashion is relatively recent for slicing up history into ten-year periods, each of them crudely flavoured and differently coloured, like a tube of wine gums. Growing up in Britain in the...
For many people including myself, 11 September has long been a date of mourning and rage. On that day in 1973, lethal aircraft flew low over a major city and destroyed a great symbolic building: the Presidential...
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