CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Essays on the role of intellectuals in a conflicted contemporary world
Noam Chomsky
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
WHAT or who is an intellectual? If you were to go by a Guardian listing of the top 300 British intellectuals, which includes the likes of Michael Gove, then the term might appear meaningless.
In this short book of essays, marking the half century since Noam Chomsky’s powerful anti-Vietnam war article with the same title in the New York Review of Books, Nicholas Allot defines the intellectual as applying to those privileged to have the “training in reading texts critically, looking up sources … and the time and job security to be able to do so in the sustained way that it takes to expose the lies of the state and other powerful agents.”
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ROGER McKENZIE expounds on the motivation that drove him to write a book that anticipates a dawn of a new, fully liberated Africa – the land of his ancestors