IAN LAVERY MP warns that decades of neoliberal policies have left former industrial communities behind — but a renewed Labour commitment to working people could change the political landscape
If you got any book tokens for Christmas, can I suggest you spend £9.99 of them on Kate Tempest’s latest book of poetry Hold Your Own?
Tempest is better known as a performance poet, holding her own in the halls alongside the John Cooper Clarkes and Scroobius Pips of this world.
But Hold Your Own sees her stepping into the world of traditional “slim volume verse,” publishing a book of poems to be read as well as heard.
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
Newly revealed documents reveal that MI5 taught Brazilian secret police the techniques deployed by the 1964-85 military dictatorship in horrific prisons like Rio de Janeiro’s House of Death. SARA VIVACQUA reports
ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
GUILLERMO THOMAS enjoys a survey of the current state of the CIA (aka Langley) from an expert and insider of sorts


