Books

The 16 August 2019 marked the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, where at least 18 people were killed by the military and 700 injured when some 80,000 people marched considerable distances to St Peter’s Field, Manchester to protest for parliamentary reform.

Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo has recently brought this to public attention. Leigh was outraged that a massacre of peaceful protesters had been effectively written out of English history. Leigh acknowledges the contribution that Robert Poole made to inform his work.

A cursory glance at the catwalks reveals a new vogue for the trappings of political engagement, from the “pussy hats” of Trumps inauguration, to feminist slogan tee shirts. But the superficiality of season-to-season trends belies a deeper relationship between what we wear, and how we think.

This book is a neat corrective to the dominant narrative that Africans have been in control since direct colonialism ended about 60 years ago. Therefore, if Africa is still backward and underdeveloped, it is the fault of Africans alone. Olivier Van Beemen demonstrates that it is the relationship of multinationals like Heineken with members of the African ruling class that upholds the dystopian dysfunction of African underdevelopment.

Alexandra Kollontai described how women’s oppression resulted in unequal and often fraught relations between men and women.

While relationships occupied an important part of Kollontai’s life, they also frustrated her. She expressed this frustration in one of short stories: “I’ve read enough novels to know just how much time and energy it takes to fall in love and I just don’t have time.”

I have long been wary of approaching the work of celebrity philosopher Alain Badiou. When even admirers of his work describe his prose as “turgid”, alarm bells ring instantly. But down the rabbit hole I ventured, and what a long, strange adventure — or event, as Badiou might put it — it was.

John Lilburne spent much of his adult life in prison, often in appalling conditions. Punished in the late 1630s for his suspected involvement in printing and distributing subversive literature, he was whipped brutally through the streets of London.

He fought for parliament in the English Civil War against the Royalists in the early 1640s. Nonetheless, he was subsequently put on trial for his life twice by parliament in the years following the execution of Charles I and the establishment of Cromwell’s ascendency.

The Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 was an atrocity waiting to happen and there were a thousand warning signs which were not acted on.

There were the obvious ones — members of the Grenfell Action Group explicitly warning of a “catastrophic fire”. And then there were the hundreds of smaller ones — every shoddy repair job and ignored complaint in social housing developments.

In his brilliant essay “The Storyteller” Walter Benjamin reflects on the work of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, concluding that “the storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself”.

We could do no better than if we approach the work of Naguib Mahfouz with Benjamin’s reflections of Leskov in mind.

Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and died in 2006. He created a body of work that is regarded as some of the most influential Arabic literature of the 20th century. In 1988 he became the first Arab writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There are some people (full disclosure: I am one) who regard Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1960) as the defining novel of the 20th century. So some celebration is called for because Grossman’s companion novel, Stalingrad, published in Russian in 1952, has finally been published in English with a superb translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. In their introduction the Chandlers claim that this is a superior work to Life and Fate.

This new collection of articles brings coherence to the climate maelstrom. Reading it shifted me from depressed romanticism to a deeper understanding of humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. That understanding brings hope that, as Sarah Ensor puts it in her chapter on biodiversity, we can “shape a convivial, sustainable Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene is the idea that we have entered a new geological epoch characterised by humanity’s dominating influence.