Andy Beckett

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...

Los Angeles​ is often imagined as a place where fun and culture happen but politics doesn’t. Since it first became a big city in the early 20th century, only a few of its political events have received global attention: the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar...