The 1950s Mau Mau war in Kenya was one of the bloodiest of the conflicts that ended the British Empire. The colonial authorities won, but the cost was too heavy to keep holding on. Still, the colonialists’ view of rebels as “debased creatures of the forest” became common.
This latest Inspector Montalbano story is the one the racists do not like. It is sympathetic towards refugees, who are shown as human beings facing hardship and tragedy, rather than as an alien “threat” to be feared or hated.
Author Andrea Camilleri has often sprinkled his Montalbano books with social comments from his left-leaning perspective — for example, targeting the links between big business, corrupt politicians and the Mafia.
But this time he wears his heart on his sleeve even more explicitly than usual by conveying a strong anti-racist message.
This incredibly enjoyable book utterly destroys the myths around masculinity and is a great read for younger men told to “man up”, “stop being such a wimp” and so on. There has been a significant rise of books around the same theme, but JJ Bola directly relates his struggles and understanding to a younger audience, which has largely gone amiss in recent years.
“The trouble with you...is that you feel that people’s stories have to make some sort of sense. Whereas in reality it’s all accidents.” So says one of the characters in David Constantine’s collection of gripping, dark and powerful short stories; stories whose unexpected twists seek to bring in some sort of light and meaning.
This book is a very important contribution to the history of anti-imperialism and racism in the UK. Priyamvada Gopal first tells the stories of several white colonialists who, as a result of the brutality of imperial rule that they witnessed, became convinced that it should be either radically reformed or ended.
The letters and the reports they either sent or brought back to Britain circulated among a growing number of anti-imperialists to become an important current that subsequently formed the basis of anti-imperialist campaigns up to the present day.
Many people assume that scientific racism and eugenics were dealt a death blow at the end of the Second World War when the nature and scale of horrifying Nazi atrocities were revealed. But Angela Saini destroys that myth in the most forensic of fashions.
First, she shows the extent to which the Nazis were foreshadowed by top British academics who sought justification for slavery, and later colonisation, in theories of racial hierarchy.
My sex education, like many of my peers, was limited. Conversations were hushed, lessons were focused on contraception and how to prevent pregnancy, and there was little discussion about sexuality, gender and the importance of giving consent.
Natalie Fiennes provides a daring and radical, if at times somewhat jumbled, overview of how sex education is “outdated and ripe for transformation”, confirming what many have said for too long.
This book is a searing account of the effects of Tory immigration policy, introduced with the support of their LibDem partners, and designed to make it impossible for irregular migrants to survive in the UK.
With laws introduced in 2014 and 2016, Home Office officials systematically set about destroying the lives of thousands of West Indians who had arrived in the UK in the 1960s and 70s.
A few weeks ago, we started the Biology unit in science. My teacher gave us a brief on the topic we would focusing on: Maintaining Biodiversity. She warned us that this was the topic that people scored lowest on in exams, which drew my attention to parallels outside of school, in the real world (shock!).
There’s much to be recommended in this account about the legendary, postwar, anti-fascist 43 Group, containing as it does terrific exploits and anecdotes from Group veterans that encapsulate masterful resistance to fascism.
Leaning on participant Morris Beckman’s classic book, The 43 Group, Sonabend illuminates the petty bourgeois nature of fascist organisation and the twin practice of its electoral and street operations. He also chronicles various fascist formations that grew in 1946, capturing internal tensions within the extreme right and the nature of wannabe Führers.
