Current Work
I am working on a review of George Orwell and Russia by Masha Karp. There are several new books on Orwell out now, so I will be kept busy doing reviews. I have paid primary visits to the archives of George Orwell held at UCL, and Bernard Crick’s archive is at Birkbeck.
Three long-term projects are the books. I will update the collection of the Why I Write series that is already in eBook form on Amazon. I want to add some more writers to a new version. The second will be a collection of essays on the historian Raphael Samuel. The third will be a short book or long essay on Oliver Cromwell and the Putney Debates. Cromwell was the subject of my car crash 2003 dissertation for my BA History at Birkbeck.
I will write a short letter to the London Review of Books. It published a terrible letter from B. Letzler called The Shoah after Gaza. He managed to call Bob Dylan’s With God on Our Side “Dud”
Recent Book Purchases
- The Carnation Revolution by Alex Fernandes. I have written previously on this subject.
- Until I Find You by Rachel Nolan. An extraordinary book well researched on the disappeared children and coercive adoptions in Guatemala.
- Cancion by Eduardo Halfon
- The Great Revolutions by Duncan Hallas. I fine SWP tradition seems to concentrate on What happened rather than why.
- The Blazing World by J Healey. This is the paperback version. I have been meaning to get around to reviewing this for ages.
- Travellers of the World Revolution by B Studer, Verso
- Marxism and the English Revolution by John Rees. This has not been released yet. I will get a review copy, hopefully.
Recent Events
I regularly attend the online SEP Postal Workers Committee. I follow their work closely and their stuff on the Post is way better than I can write. They write about it. I work it. A good combination.
I have started to watch a few episodes of Sky’s Royal Kill List. What a terrible piece of television. If there was a historian consulted on this programme, he should share the same fate as Charles 1st. When a series has so much swearing, it has very little to say and even less history.
A Trumpet of Sedition 