Reviews

The spotlight is on the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland once more as Theresa May seeks to shore up her shoddy election performance by allying the ailing Tories to the Democratic Unionist Party.

Ciaran McMenamin’s drug-fuelled joy-ride Skintown is a wild and fantastic odyssey that’s not to be missed.

A Blaze in a Desert is a slim volume of selected poems by Victor Serge. Serge was a revolutionary and writer who witnessed many of the great political highs and terrible lows in the first half of the 20th century.

He was inspired by the revolution and arrived in Russia in January 1919, shortly afterwards joining the Bolshevik Party. He consistently opposed Stalin and was exiled.

Dismissed and derided for decades, socialism is back.

From Jeremy Corbyn to Bernie Sanders, the forces fuelling its comeback are associated with movements against austerity, racism and war. But their main focus for pushing through social change is still parliamentary reform.

So if reformist socialists who focus on parliament are making headway, why should the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s ideas matter today? John Molyneux’s Lenin for Today argues that “Lenin is relevant because the Russian Revolution is relevant”.

On the face of it, Neil Faulkner has written a reasonably good history of the Russian Revolution. This should not be surprising. As he acknowledges, between 1980 and 2010 he was an active member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and took part in debates on the international working class movement.