Justin Reynolds
London Overgrown: the ‘rewilding’ of a city
A new collection by electronica pioneer John Foxx imagining the rewilding of London offers a sonic tour through a new green city including ‘The Glades of Soho’ and ‘The Hanging Gardens of Shoreditch’.
Politics, poetry, imagination: a life of Shelley
In an age ever more obsessed with the importance of crafting effective political ‘stories’ and ‘narratives’, Jacqueline Mulhallen’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary is a timely review of the life and work of a…
Submission: a scepticism that questions scepticism
Michel Houellebecq, ever controversial, imagines France shunning centre-left and -right and voting for an Islamic republic to defeat Marine Le Pen’s Front National. A piquant review of an acerbic novel on the limits of liberalism.
Landscapes of Communism: the Soviet Union’s architectural legacy
What might a non-capitalist architecture look like? Owen Hatherley’s Landscapes of Communism takes a tour through the architectural legacy of the Soviet Union.
A Very British Coup, revisited
A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin’s 1982 thriller about a radical Labour leader brought down by a fearful establishment makes for fascinating re-reading in light of Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected success in this year’s leadership campaign.
‘Tsunami’ – or the inevitable rise and rise of the SNP
A sympathetic but critical review of Tsunami: Scotland’s Democratic Revolution, the third in Iain Macwhirter’s series of books attempting to map Scotland’s fast changing political landscape where the SNP fortress seems unassailable.
Euclid Tsakalotos, Greece, and the dream of a new Europe
Like his colourful predecessor Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos is an economics professor turned politician with a strong belief in the potential of the European Union as a force for progressive change,…
Blue Labour’s theology of the common good
British politicians famously ‘don’t do God’. But much of Labour’s programme for government is inspired by an avowedly theological movement: Blue Labour. Justin Reynolds reviews a new book challenging orthodoxies of the left and right.
Scottish Labour: Utopia… or bust?
Justin Reynolds argues Scottish Labour needs to steer a course between soaring idealism and sober pragmatism to confront the spirit of utopianism set free by last year’s referendum.
Scotland’s revolutionaries: another perspective on the Yes movement
What is the Yes movement? A protest? A religion? A cult? No: with its discipline, utopianism, strategic intelligence and sense of historic agency it bears the classic hallmarks of a revolutionary movement.
General Election 2015: a clearer view from the window seat
The view from a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet affords clearer insights into at least five crucial global issues missing from the general election campaign debates and obscured by its heat and dust.
Does classic British social democracy have a future?
Back to The Future of Socialism, by the Labour MP and former Cabinet minister Peter Hain is a bold effort to reimagine for today the most influential text by a British social democrat of the…