Alan Thornett died on October 9th at the age of 89. He was a remarkable man of the highest principles and a lifelong commitment to revolutionary socialist politics, a cause which cost him personall…

Would the peasantry of Essex, Kent, Cambridgeshire and other parts of southern England been able to organise a kingdom shaking rebellion if they were sorting out the details on interminable threads…

Green Party members are now learning the truth of the Piranhas’ observation in their 1980 track that getting beaten up is part of growing up. The party is currently on the receiving end of an ideol…

At the funeral of a relative who spent quite a lot of time in prison for his role in a politically absurd and militarily futile operation, the man in charge of his team described his approach to th…

Jamie Bryson is the poison dwarf of Irish politics, and I say that as a member of the vertically challenged community. He is the driving force behind the attempt to reassert loyalist ethno-supremac…

At the funeral of a relative who spent quite a lot of time in prison for his role in a politically absurd and militarily futile operation, the man in charge of his team described his approach to th…

The embroidery is a memorial to Anne Magee, murdered in 1976 at the age of sixteen by loyalist gunmen who apparently were also teenagers and whose identities are not in the public domain. They also…

De Gaulle Liberté, the second part of the epic on the French war leader, opens with a display of French military prowess beating, erm, the Italians in a desert skirmish. Even at almost three hours …

At this stage in life Bobby Gillespie should probably be promoting a new album of acoustic ballads reflecting on the pleasures of pootling around London on the top deck of a bus using his free trav…

Fauda is now onto its fifth season on Netflix. It concerns the adventures of an Israeli intelligence unit tasked with tracking down Palestinians, killing the lucky ones and throwing the rest into B…

It is probably a bit unfair to compare Robert Jenrick to Benito Mussolini. After all, Mussolini demonstrated some personal courage by leaving a cushy job editing a newspaper to serve in the Italian…

The book is called Bless Me Father, the phrase Catholics use when confessing their sins to the priest. There are some details I think might have been best revealed only in the privacy of the confes…

When Isaac Deutscher, author of the definitive biography of Trotsky, decided he was an atheist he put his hypothesis about the non-existence of God to the test. His method was to go to the grave of…

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The embroidery is a memorial to Anne Magee, murdered in 1976 at the age of sixteen by loyalist gunmen who apparently were also teenagers and whose identities are not in the public domain. They also…

De Gaulle: Résistance is in cinemas at the moment, and a second part De Gaulle: Liberté will be screened in a few weeks. This is a fascinating film mainly because it is so unintentionally honest ab…

Podcast Episode · The Rest Is History · 19 August · 1hr 12min

Last weekend in bars or cafes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Israeli soldiers will have been bragging about the Palestinians they shot like farmers shoot rats. A couple of tank crew members will have be…

“Master Sun said: “fighting with many is the same as fighting with few; it is a matter of marshalling men with Lambeg drums and hideous sounding flute bands, identifying them with flags and tacky n…

12 Years a Slave by Steve McQueen is a superb film, but I have only been able to watch it once. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a real person who was abducted and enslaved. One scene depict…

The 80s star will no longer appear in role of Herod in London Palladium run, with manager saying decision is ‘in the best interests of my artist’

At some point in Germany in the 1970s there was a meeting at which the discussion was broadly along these lines: Comrade Chairwoman Inge: How dare you call yourself revolutionary fighters for the p…

I was so keen to see this on the day of release that I rescheduled the installation of a new shower which means that the current one will have to wheeze on till mid-August. Was this gamble with my …

OK. The title is slightly misleading. Apple’s new eight-part series is set in a version of Brezhnev’s USSR in an adjacent reality in which the Soviets put the first woman on the moon and a man on V…

Socialist Worker’s sensibly anonymous obituary of Ann Widdecombe is mostly boilerplate stuff with an AI style summary of many of her more objectionable ideas, though it does come with a warning tha…

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you…

Moygashel, a village in county Tyrone, owes its name to a corruption of Maigh gCaisil, which translates as “plain of the stone fort.” It is the sort of place Karl Marx had in mind when he referred …

“I will engage that there is not, even among the lowest class of the people, a single man now to be found in England, who would not laugh to scorn any attempt to make him believe that one of the pa…

The second section of Christopher Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution is divided into chapters focussing on intellectually significant figures linked to the English Revolution. Thomas Hobbes is in the…

A reliance on a version of Christian dogma by Davey and Linda Hoy, founders of the Armoy Christian Centre, led to Jeffrey Donaldson being able to escape justice for decades. They “facilitated” a me…

Reactionaries and other supporters of genocide hate Kneecap with a rare passion. That is their loss. Fenian, which was released earlier this year, contains two bona fide masterpieces in An Irish Go…

The history of 19th and 20th century Marxist organisations is a bit like that of the early Christian sects. Much of what we know about them is from materials written by their opponents, their own w…

There are two Englishmen it is considered socially unacceptable to criticise. David Attenborough has the status of a living god and seems like a nice man. I find his stuff unwatchable because of th…

Every organisation of more than two or three people will have its share of cranks, oddballs and members with an underdeveloped understanding of personal hygiene. Organisations with memberships in t…

At the weekend Carla Lockhart MP, a prominent member of the far-right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), stood with a large group of masked men in Scarva. They were demonstrating in support of the Is…

Jonathan was enthusiastic about serving after October 7th. Now he is ashamed

Tower Hamlets Green Party is calling for Abul Monsur, recently elected councillor for Lansbury ward, to stand down immediately and for Aspire to formally expel him. Mr Monsur is a Holocaust denier and...