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Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Jonathan C. Slaght - Owls of the Eastern Ice

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Reading a blow by blow account of someone studying for a PHd might not be the most exciting of book choices, but Jonathan Slaght's accou...
Thursday, August 20, 2020

William Dalrymple - The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

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The story of the East India Company is perhaps without parallel in colonial history. The rise of a minor trading company, founded in 1599, t...
Friday, August 14, 2020

Mike Davis - The Monster Enters

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Those of us who read Mike Davis' The Monster at Our Door in 2005 were perhaps more mentally prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic than ma...
Thursday, August 13, 2020

Iain Banks - Stonemouth

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*** Spoiler Alert *** Stewart Gilmour returns to Stonemouth, a small town in Aberdeenshire. Its almost seven years since he's been there...
Saturday, August 08, 2020

Ashley Dawson - People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

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In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution Lenin said in a November 1920 speech that Communism would be "Soviet power plus the electri...
Sunday, August 02, 2020

Priyamvada Gopal - Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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One of the consequences of the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a renewed discussion about the nature and legacy...
Thursday, July 30, 2020

Charlie Jane Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

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One of my best reads over the Covid period was Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night so I was really pleased that ...
Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Nick Martell - The Kingdom of Liars

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I was looking forward to reading Nick Martell's debut novel because it seemed to offer an intriguing basis for the magic of this fanta...
Monday, July 27, 2020

The Vinland Sagas - The Norse Discovery of America

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Conventional wisdom has it that in 1492 Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. Of course he didn't discover it - that wa...
Sunday, July 26, 2020

Mark Roseman - The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution

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When I was young we had several trips to Berlin to visit family. There we would always look forward to visiting the Wannsee resort, playin...
Thursday, July 23, 2020

Richard Benson - The Farm

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Picking up The Farm I will admit that I thought it would be a rather annoying romanticised description of life in the countryside. But Ri...
Monday, July 20, 2020

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

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One of the things that becomes quickly very clear when reading Frankenstein for the first time, is that you aren't reading the book y...
Friday, July 17, 2020

Jonathan Crary - 24/7

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Karl Marx pointed out that there are two ways that the capitalists can extract extra surplus value from workers and hence make more profit...
Thursday, July 09, 2020

Kevin B. Anderson - Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity & Non-Western Societies

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Karl Marx is popularly seen as an economist. His writings are often reduced down to an economic analysis and critic of capitalism. However...
Monday, July 06, 2020

Nina Lakhani - Who killed Berta Cáceres?

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Between 2002 and 2017 some 1,500 activists were killed for their roles in protecting water, land, natural resources and the communities th...