Books

One thing I learnt from this book is that the military are the biggest employers of musicians in Britain.

As someone who expends a fair bit of effort supporting and promoting music, I know the struggle and sacrifice of new and exciting musicians just to get by. As a teacher, I am also well aware of the continuous fight to protect the place of music, and to defend children’s access to it, in schools. It came as a shock, then, to find that in one sector there is more than enough public money for musicians to live on.

The thread linking Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche to Karl Marx may seem tenuous to many, but with typical verve and bravura and not a little waspish humour Eagleton has made these connections in his defence of materialism and critique of the metaphysical. In the preface he nails his colours to the mast of “unabashed universalism” which he hopes will scandalise “only those postmodern dogmatists for whom all universal claims are oppressive”.

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls is an exciting new book for kids which is creating a stir. When I was a kid it was hard to find books with inspirational female characters for younger children. Michael Foreman’s All the King’s Horses was one of our favourites, as well as his retellings of classic fairy tales (both criminally out of print for years), but similar offerings were hard to come by.

Anyone with the remotest interest in miscarriages of justice should not delay in purchasing Richard Ingrams’ biography of the journalist and TV presenter Ludovic Kennedy. This is not a traditional biography, setting out in detail the events of his life, but instead a testimony to his contribution to his groundbreaking campaigns for justice.

In this frustrating yet fascinating book, philosopher Daniel Dennett sets out to explain the emergence of human consciousness. And though it draws on recent research into computing, palaeontology and cellular biology, its polemic takes our understanding of evolution backwards.

H M Hellyer was both witness and participant in the momentous events that shook Egypt in 2011 and the subsequent developments that finally led to the military coup of July 2013. From visiting and staying in Tahrir Square to helping form one of the numerous local committees that sprang up to guard and look after local communities when the regime sent out its thugs, Hellyer was joyously drawn to the revolution and his world outlook was transformed.

Socialists have always been at the forefront of the fight against antisemitism. A quick look back at history proves this — socialist organisation was central to opposing Bristish fascist Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, against the rise of Hitler in Germany and against the National Front in the 1970s.

Writing about Lenin is a crowded field and inevitably controversial. This reflects the extraordinary role played by Lenin himself in the only socialist revolution thus far in the history of capitalism. Hated and demonised by Cold War historians, distorted and buried under the Stalinist rewriting of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, all writers who attempt to present what Lenin actually wrote, said and did are most welcome.

Testosterone Rex is a firm riposte to the recent book Testosterone: Sex, Power and the Will to Win, which places testosterone as so important that “a simple fact remains: without testosterone there would be no humans to have a history”. This bold claim is challenged by neuroscientist and feminist writer Cordelia Fine, who wrote the bestselling Delusions of Gender.

On Monday 18 July 1898 the French novelist Emile Zola was sentenced to a year in prison and a 3,000 franc fine. His crime was to have written an open letter to the French president entitled “J’accuse” (I accuse).

In it Zola accused military officials, including the minister of war, of falsely convicting Major Alfred Dreyfus (a Jewish officer) of passing military secrets to Germany. Fully aware that he risked prosecution for libel by denouncing the army and government’s handling of the Dreyfus affair, Zola boldly stated: