Reviews

Gorgeous George by David Morley Given his colossal ego, z-list celebrity status and continuing admiration of Stalinist politics, it is hard to imagine a better candidate for biography than George Galloway. However, those who deduce from David Morley’s chosen title, “Gorgeous George”, that the book is irreverent or cutting will be greatly disappointed. Much of the biography is a narrative of Gorgeous George’s alleged financial improprieties. It reports the legal wranglings but draws no conclusions. It does not ask why a supposed “workers’ representative” would refuse to draw only a workers’...

David Broder reviews Fawwaz Traboulsi’s A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press) Baptised by its publisher as “the first comprehensive history of Lebanon in the modern period”, Traboulsi’s is a thorough account of almost 500 years of ethnic and religious conflict in the Middle Eastern state. However the author, a 1970s leader of the Organisation of Communist Action (OCA), obscures his own analysis and views in favour of a work which rarely amounts to anything more than dry chronology of events, dates and facts. As a self-proclaimed Marxist, one might have thought that Traboulsi would take an...

DALE STREET reviews The Blair Years — Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries “Some twat with a Trot poster came up to me on the way in (to the conference) and yelled ‘Butcher! Traitor!’ at me,” writes Campbell in his diary entry for 29 April 1995. “I stopped and mustered as much visual contempt as I could, then assured him that if we win the general election, then don’t worry — thanks to wankers like him, there will always be another Tory government along afterwards. These people make me vomit.” There are many people in Campbell’s diaries who make him want to vomit. Roy Hattersley is “a...

Steve Cohen continues a series about important socialist novels, looking at Ring Lardner Jr and the background to his novel the Ecstasy of Edwin Muir. Ring Lardner Jr. was one of the Hollywood Ten — the ten screenwriters who went to prison for refusing in 1947 to testify before the House of Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Today he is best remembered, if at all, for his response to the question as to whether he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party — “I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did I would hate myself in the morning”. Though HUAC is...

Charlie Salmon reviews “An Ecosocialist Manifesto” by Joel Kovel and Michael Löwy “The twenty-first century opens on a catastrophic note, with an unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic world order beset with terror and clusters of low-grade, disintegrative warfare… In our view, the crises of ecology and those of societal breakdown are profoundly interrelated and should be seen as different manifestations of the same structural forces.” An Ecosocialist Manifesto, Kovel and Löwy The word “manifesto” has a particular resonance for class-struggle socialists. In 1848 Karl Marx...