CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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An inspirational heritage
MARY DAVIS recommends a classic biography of socialist and feminist pioneer Eleanor Marx
Eleanor Marx
[William Collison - National Free Labour Association]
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
Eleanor Marx: A Biography
by Yvonne Kapp
(Verso, £21)
THIS single volume new edition of Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx, first published over 40 years ago, was deservedly highly acclaimed at the time. EJ Hobsbawm praised it as “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th century biography” and Michael Foot described it as “a work of scholarship but also a work of art.”
Those accolades and many others remain as true today as when the first two volumes were published and the new edition, coming in at more than 850 pages, reveals Kapp’s meticulous scholarship, historical intelligence and sensitive insight, bounded by flawless prose, for a new readership.
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MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes, with reservations, a scholarly addition to the unfinished business of understanding how capital works on a world scale
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer