Out of Bounds

Ian Gilmour: Why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron, 20 January 2005

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 
by William St Clair.
Cambridge, 765 pp., £90, July 2004, 9780521810067
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... in determining the cultural consciousness of 18th-century society will have obvious echoes of Karl Marx. But, just as Popper pointed out that while Beethoven was affected by such social developments as the enlargement of the orchestra, no theory of metaphysical or materialist determinism could explain a single bar of his music, St Clair is clear that ...

Dawn of the Dark Ages

Ronald Stevens: Fleet Street magnates, 4 December 2003

Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street 
by Ruth Dudley Edwards.
Secker, 484 pp., £20, May 2003, 0 436 19992 0
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... man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he believes that every Labour Party pamphlet is an addendum to the gospels. If he were, he would be just another Bloomsbury drawing-room socialist . . . Cudlipp is just fed up with the evil complacency which is still the order of the day ...

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4
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... Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson as in that of the 19th-century prosaic fantasists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ – but he would have been hard put to point to the aspects of fantasy in the works of ‘Marx, that old shaman’, the overwhelming majority of which were devoted to the analysis of ...

Every Penny a Vote

Alexander Zevin: Neoliberalism, 15 August 2019

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism 
by Quinn Slobodian.
Harvard, 381 pp., £25.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97952 9
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... Dollfuss moved against the socialists, putting down a fitful uprising of workers in Linz, shelling Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, expelling the Social Democrats from parliament and passing a new corporatist constitution. He was assassinated in an attempted Nazi coup in July. That same year Mises left for Geneva. The Austrians had strong links with organisations ...

Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
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... a comprehensive economic plan. Central planning is usually associated with Marxism, though Karl Marx himself expressed only a vague hope of bringing industry under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the ‘social anarchy’ of ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... levels of acceptable invective, and Paulin’s rhetoric is mild indeed by the standards of Karl Marx or Sir Thomas More. But there is something to be said for the comic mode of Martin Marprelate or Marvell: radical satire is in danger of belying its ends if its tone becomes authoritarian or blustering, and Paulin can be heavy-handed. The ...

Melchior

Francis Spufford, 3 May 1984

... change swirl around my ankles. Standing at the back of a crowd listening to a speaker at the Karl Marx Hof, he was trampled to death when the police charged and the crowd turned. Later people found ochre-coloured stains on their shoes and socks. When Melchior’s father died was the residue of the family precious? Did Melchior burn the library to ...

Blumsday

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 3 November 1983

Léon Blum 
by Jean Lacouture, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 571 pp., $39.50, October 1982, 0 8419 0775 7
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... orator Jaurès and expressed both admiration and affection for him. He took an interest in Karl Marx, whose work excited in him an admiration inversely proportional to the amount of it he had actually read. It was not difficult for the two circles, Socialist and Jewish, to meet, since both were on the fringes of French life up to 1914: the same is ...

Best Remain Seated

Jeremy Harding: Travel guides, 1 January 1998

Kenya 
by Hugh Finlay and Geoff Crowther.
Lonely Planet, 376 pp., £11.99, April 1997, 0 86442 460 4
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Borneo 
by Robert Pelton Young.
Fielding, 632 pp., £13.95, December 1995, 1 56952 026 7
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Asia's Top Dive Sites 
edited by Fiona Nichols and Michael Stachels.
Fielding, 228 pp., £13.95, December 1996, 1 56952 129 8
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South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland 
by Jon Murray et al.
Lonely Planet, 658 pp., £13.99, January 1998, 0 86442 508 2
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Southern Africa 
by Richard Cox.
Thornton Cox, 474 pp., £11.95, July 1995, 0 7818 0388 8
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The World's Most Dangerous Places 
by Robert Pelton Young.
Fielding, 1048 pp., £13.95, December 1997, 1 56952 104 2
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South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland 
by Barbara McCrea et al.
Rough Guides, 697 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 1 85828 238 1
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The Good Honeymoon Guide 
by Lucy Horne.
Trailblazer, 320 pp., £11.95, March 1997, 1 873756 12 7
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Amnesty International Report 1997 
Amnesty International, 378 pp., £18, June 1997, 0 86210 267 7Show More
Morocco 
by Barnaby Rogerson.
Cadogan, 596 pp., £12.99, December 1997, 1 86011 043 6
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... possible to get from Hotel Tourismo to the Minigolf beach complex by heading north along Avenida Karl Marx, turning right into Ho Chi Minh, left onto Vladimir Lenine, proceeding north again for eight blocks, taking another right onto Mao Tse Tung and, a dozen blocks later, a left onto Kim Il Sung. However diligent their fact files (when it comes to the ...

Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics 
by Arpad Kadarkay.
Blackwell, 538 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 55786 114 5
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... composition is not consistent with my conscience’ – reminds one more of Groucho than of Karl Marx; anyway, Kadarkay doesn’t think it was the real reason. Nor, however, is there certain evidence that Lukács was tipped off about Khrushchev’s decision to crush the revolution with tanks. But since Lukács was regarded in Budapest as ‘our ...

Art of Embarrassment

A.D. Nuttall, 18 August 1994

Essays, Mainly Shakespearean 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 386 pp., £40, March 1994, 0 521 40444 4
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English Comedy 
edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £35, March 1994, 0 521 41917 4
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... to be unimpeded in the way the sentimentalist requires. Indeed, it is almost as if Shakespeare saw Karl Marx coming and resolved to enjoy himself. Early in the play the people are starving and ask the patricians for corn. The smooth-talking Menenius fobs them off with the notorious ‘Fable of the Belly’, in which he explains that they, the people, are ...

The Fall of the Shah

Malise Ruthven, 4 July 1985

Shah of Shahs 
by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated by William Brand.
Quartet, 152 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 7043 2473 3
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The Pride and the Fall: Iran 1974-1979 
by Anthony Parsons.
Cape, 160 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 224 02196 6
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Iran under the Ayatollahs 
by Dilip Hiro.
Routledge, 416 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780710099242
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Obbligato: Notes on a Foreign Service Career 
by William Sullivan.
Norton, 279 pp., £13.95, October 1984, 0 393 01809 1
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Envoy to the Middle World: Adventures in Diplomacy 
by George McGhee.
Harper and Row, 458 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 06 039025 5
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The Persians amongst the English 
by Denis Wright.
Tauris, 273 pp., £17.95, February 1985, 1 85043 002 0
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... book – an omission comparable to writing an account of the Russian Revolution without mentioning Karl Marx, or of the French without Rousseau. Shariati died in London in 1977 (reputedly at the hand of SAVAK agents, though the British coroner recorded a verdict of natural causes), but pamphlets and cassettes of his famous lectures delivered at the ...

His Bonnet Akimbo

Patrick Wright: Hamish Henderson, 3 November 2011

Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. I: The Making of the Poet (1919-53) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 416 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 1 84697 132 7
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Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. II: Poetry Becomes People (1954-2002) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 395 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 1 84697 063 4
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... questions. Were the members of Scotland’s Highland communities a ‘remnant’ people such as Karl Marx had identified: ‘left over from an earlier population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became the repository of historical development’? And was his country further condemned, thanks to its lack of truly galvanising and ...

Wessis and Ossis

Neal Ascherson: Traces of the GDR, 14 December 2023

Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-90 
by Katja Hoyer.
Allen Lane, 475 pp., £25, April 2023, 978 0 241 55378 7
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Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 
by Frank Trentmann.
Allen Lane, 837 pp., £40, November 2023, 978 0 241 30349 8
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... old German Communist Party that Hitler crushed in 1933. The KPD regarded itself as the party of Karl Marx, heir to the mighty tradition of German revolutionary socialism and therefore the senior working-class movement in the world. This sense of superiority, loudly voiced, explains the iron confidence of the group who built the GDR – and also the ...

Capture the Flag

Rory Scothorne: Labour in Scotland, 4 June 2026

A History of the Scottish Labour Party 
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 314 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 3995 4480 1
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... Stirling Bridge, Bruce and Wallace’ than with ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat and Karl Marx’. This mixture of protest and power-seeking was bound to curdle. Torrance notes that Scottish Labour’s own mythology celebrates a party – the ILP – that seceded from it in 1932, disgusted at the betrayals of MacDonald’s second term. In ...