Reviews

The literary world is no stranger to the infinite possibilities of speculative fiction. However, Shlomo Avineri’s latest addition to the mountain of books devoted to life and work of Karl Marx belongs to a new and ignominious genre — speculative biography.

This book of photographs is linked to a documentary of the same name. It tells some of the stories of the Troubles in Northern Ireland using the photographs and memories of seven photographers: Stanley Matchett, Trevor Dickson, Alan Lewis, Martin Nangle, Crispin Rodwell and Paul Faith.

They each have their own chapter where they explain something of their own professional lives before providing a commentary on their photographs, which span from the 1960s until the early noughties.

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.

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.