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Why Gorbachev Failed

“At the height of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev had a dream. The familiar system of one-party rule would smoothly open up to allow for the free play of other political forces, and, in the strange new world of electoral competition, the Communist Party would remain the voters’ favourite. Faced . . .” read more

Conditions of Our Existence: Ernest Gellner (1925-1995)

“It is impossible not to see a biographical element at work in Ernest Gellner’s insistence on the need for radical rethinking of our place in history. For his life made him rather like the ‘pure visitor’ whose detachment he recommended as a cognitive strategy. Both his parents were . . .” read more

Reviewing a Life. Fred Inglis’s Biography of Raymond Williams

“The publication of a first biography of Raymond Williams was bound to be a significant event for anyone touched by his work and yet now, in a period of immense uncertainty, doubtful of its enduring value and political resonance. Michel Foucault died of aids in 1984 and . . .” read more

Ice Empire and Ice Hockey: Two Fin de Siecle Dreams

“At the beginning of September 1939, the Reichswehr invaded Poland from the West; two weeks later the Red Army invaded from the East. On September 28, Hitler and Stalin signed a partition agreement which gave each tyrant half of a sad country which had only twenty-one years of . . .” read more

Tom Paine and Civil Society

“Meet Tom Paine, raconteur, polemicist, a commoner who dominated political discussion in three countries and served the cause of revolution in them all. John Keane is eager to treat Paine as a contemporary, someone who though dead is, in the force of his thought and the vigour of . . .” read more

Ernest Mandel 1923-1995

“Ernest Mandel, who died at the age of seventy-two on July 20th, was possessed of outstanding talents as thinker, speaker and political leader, in a combination that has become rarer as the century has progressed. He was one of the world’s leading Marxist economists, and author of more . . .” read more

The Luck of a Crazy Youth (Interview with Ernest Mandel)

“Ernest, you were ten years old when Hitler seized power in Germany and sixteen when World War Two broke out. It was surely an awful time to be young, especially for someone like you, from a Jewish background. What are your first memories of that period?” read more

The Prophet of Kelmscott

“‘Grim tatty cities full of spivs, snobs and vandals’: that is a visitor’s verdict on England, a century after William Morris (1834–96). Obviously, he would have been disappointed, having hoped that an ideal society would begin to take shape some time in the 1950s. Obviously, too, people are . . .” read more

Haldeman’s Sixties

“H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s crew-cut Chief of Staff, was the man Nixon trusted most. That made him the most powerful person in the Nixon White House after the President himself. ‘If a historian had had a fantasy of knowing all that one man nearest to Nixon had known,’ . . .” read more

Ralph Miliband 1924-1994

“The death of Ralph Miliband in May, shortly after his seventieth birthday, takes from us an outstanding advocate of democratic socialism, the leading Marxist political scientist in the English-speaking world, and someone who was an inspiration to several generations of the New Left. Ralph Miliband was, of course, . . .” read more

Reflections on Ralph Miliband

“Ralph Miliband was my colleage at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Over the years that he taught there, he also became my friend. I relied on our talks in the corridor and the cafeteria, or sometimes at my home. Ralph was always warm . . .” read more

The Present Tense

“Two or three weeks ago Michael Grade, the chief executive of Channel 4, rang me to say that Dennis Potter was dying of cancer. After trying to absorb this we decided to ask Dennis if he would do one last interview. He agreed.” read more

Irving Howe

“In one of his essays Ignazio Silone says that, as a child, he once laughed at the sight of a man being dragged through the street by the police. His father reproved him harshly, telling him never to make fun of a man who has been arrested. ‘Because . . .” read more

Reply to John Newsinger

“Over the past decade, I must have read yards of stuff, much of it penned by wised-up radicals, about the decay of authorship. The writer, we are often instructed, barely matters at all. His or her intentions and desires are an obstacle to a close reading or a . . .” read more

An Episode in the Larkin Wars

“Christopher Hitchens’ article on ‘Larkin and “Sensitivity” ’ in nlr 200 is as energetic an exercise in sectarian bile as I have seen on the Left in recent years. My seven-page review of Larkin’s Selected Letters that appeared in the journal Race and Class seems to have . . .” read more

Our Post-Communism: The Legacy of Karl Kautsky

“Recently, as a result of preparing for this paper, I read for the first time Karl Kautsky’s Bolshevism at a Deadlock, published in German, in September 1930, as Der Bolschewismus in der Sackgasse—which we could better translate perhaps as No Way Through for Bolshevism. I found this an . . .” read more

E.P. Thompson, The Historian: an Appreciation

“Edward Thompson was a remarkable person and a great historian. That does not mean that he was always right or that later generations will always read his works in the same ways. But he was wonderfully creative and original, full of pioneering insights, with his own distinctive style . . .” read more

Anti-Hegemony: The Legacy of William Blake

“This has been a long, and perhaps strange, way into William Blake. On one matter I am impenitent. Blake can’t have dreamed up a whole vocabulary of symbolism, which touches at so many points the traditions which I have discussed, for himself ab novo. Nor can he have . . .” read more

From the Upper West Side to Wick Episcopi

“don’t go barefoot to a snake-stomping! loosen your wigs! It’s no use hooking them both on the same circuit— The English and American traditions. It won’t take the play out of the loose eccentrics. Cattlemen, sheepmen and outlaws, that’s American writing, And few enough . . .” read more

Edward Thompson and the New Left

“The death of Edward Thompson on 28 August takes from us the most eloquent voice on the British Left, a historian who transformed his craft, a writer of some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, a thinker who knew that ideas were not a world . . .” read more

The Personal and the Political

“Sheila Rowbotham: Your new book, Outsiders, suggests to me a general feature of your work—an awareness of class as a general feature of society but also of the cultural nuances which bind or separate people into or between classes. Was there something in your family background which . . .” read more

Witches and Shamans

“The subject on which I have been invited to speak today—witches and shamans—is central to my book Storia notturna. Una decifrazione del sabba, which is appearing now, a few years after the Italian edition, in Japanese translation. Instead of summarizing my book in its final form, I prefer . . .” read more

Something About the Poetry: Larkin and 'Sensitivity'

“To Julian Barnes, on 27 September 1985, Philip Larkin wrote concerning an encounter with almost the only woman he ever admitted to ‘adoring’:” read more

Harold Laski: An Exemplary Public Intellectual

“Before proceeding with this review, I should, as they say, declare an interest. I came to know Harold Laski as a student at the London School of Economics (then evacuated in Cambridge) between 1941 and 1943; and I was fairly close to him after I came back to . . .” read more

Petra Kelly and Willy Brandt

“The deaths of Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly in a way mark the end of two successive generations of mass leaders, two eras of the West European Left, spanning more than fifty years. Willy Brandt, a man of very modest beginnings, identified from his earliest youth with the . . .” read more

David Widgery

“In the moment I heard that David Widgery had died, I saw him standing in front of me on York station in the early summer of 1968. His eyes were shining and he had a grin on his face as though it were fixed there forever. I was . . .” read more

Self-Portrait of a Russian Feminist

“What sort of family do you come from? How did you become what you are now?” read more

The Elegy of Wild Swans

“The significance and integrity of this first-hand account of the lives of three women in twentieth-century China—the author, her mother and grandmother—so vividly written and ambitious in scope, are beyond question. The author, someone of my own age and background, was born in 1952 to a Communist family, . . .” read more

A Culture in Contraflow--II

“A movement from modes of production to those of communication, which marks the historical anthropology of Jack Goody was, of course, also one of the central themes of the work of Raymond Williams. The parallels in the development of an original cultural materialism in the two bodies of . . .” read more

Tamara Deutscher: 1913-1990

“It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Tamara Deutscher, whose counsel and encouragement have meant so much to this Review over a period of a quarter of a century.” read more

A Culture in Contraflow--I

“Few subjects can be so elusive as a national culture. The term lends itself to any number of meanings, each presenting its own difficulties of definition or application. Towards the end of the sixties, I tried to explore what seemed one significant structure to fall under such a . . .” read more

For and Against Althusser

“Gregory Elliott’s book appears at a time when the reputation of its subject seems near to total eclipse. In Althusser’s own country he is, as Elliott reports, practically a ‘dead dog’, buried beneath ‘the settled anti-Marxist consensus among the majority of the French intelligentsia’. In Britain he is . . .” read more

C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary

“For several years I have been introducing students and friends to C.L.R. James’s book, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Originally published in 1938, it is a study of the great Haitian slave insurrection that began in 1791 and was directly influenced by the . . .” read more

Reply to Russell Jacoby

“lynn garafola replies: Russell Jacoby’s tirade exemplifies all the worst qualities of his book: ad hominem attacks, a refusal to engage with ideas, and an outdated definition of intellectual life. Presented with criticism, he simply reiterates in a similar tone the misconceptions and personal prejudices that . . .” read more

A Reply to Lynn Garafola

“Stray phrases are sometimes more revealing than central points. Lynn Garafola in her intemperate review of my book calls me a ‘self-proclaimed leftist’. What she means is that I have not been licensed by her circles that deliver the official proclamations. She is incensed because I lack respect . . .” read more

The Last Intellectuals

“The 1980s have not been good to American intellectuals of the Left. The election of Ronald Reagan brought neo-conservatives to power, and with them a host of new institutions—most notably, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute—that set about rewriting the intellectual agenda. In the ensuing debate . . .” read more

Raymond Williams and the Politics of a New Left

“The death of Raymond Williams on January 26th robs the left in Britain of its most authoritative, consistent and radical voice. His loss is the more difficult to bear in that it was unexpected and came when he was at the height of his powers. Tributes to Williams . . .” read more

Resources for a Journey of Hope: The Significance of Raymond Williams

“Raymond Williams and I arrived in Cambridge simultaneously in 1961, he from a long stint in adult education to a college Fellowship, I from a year’s teaching in a Northern secondary modern school to an undergraduate place. It was hard to say which of us was more alienated. . . .” read more

The Odyssey of Paul Hirst

“Over the last decade and a half, widespread shifts have occurred within Britain’s Left intelligentsia, in a complex series of changes, with many cross-currents—making for an intellectual and political scene today very different from that of the early 70’s. Some of these changes have been challenging and radicalizing: . . .” read more

A Jew in Wartime Belgium

“The death of Marcel Liebman in March of this year has deprived us of a major twentieth-century historian whose roots lay in classical Marxism untainted by leaden orthodoxies or passing fashions. Born in 1929 in Brussels, Liebman was educated in the Belgian capital and at the London School . . .” read more

Nicolas Krasso: 1930-1986

“It is with great sadness that we inform our readers of the death of Nicolas Krassó; he died on January 10th this year, following a fire accident at his home in November from which he did not recover. Nicolas joined the editorial committee of the Review in 1965. . . .” read more

Revolution Against 'Progress': Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism

“Walter Benjamin’s style of thinking is unique and resists classification, but it can be better understood and explained if related to the cultural atmosphere of Mittel-Europa at the beginning of the century, and to certain religiouspolitical undercurrents among German-speaking Jewish intellectuals of this period. Neo-romanticism, as a moral . . .” read more

A Philosophico-Political Profile

“Could you tell us something of the sequence of the principal intellectual influences on your work? You are often represented as an heir of the Frankfurt School who gave its legacy a ‘linguistic turn’, with a move from a philosophy of consciousness to one of language. Is this . . .” read more

The Path to Rooted Freedom

“Struck yesterday, as I leafed anew through Gide’s journal, by its religious aspect. It is primarily a Protestant self-examination, and then a book of meditation and prayer. Nothing in common with Montaigne’s essays, the Goncourts’ diary or Renard’s journal. The basic thing is the struggle against sin. And . . .” read more

'Drop the Glass Industry': Collaborating with E.H.Carr

“Carr and I first corresponded in 1955, after he had borrowed my thesis on The Development of the Soviet Budgetary System. We met a year later in 1956, when he gave a seminar in Glasgow, where I had my first academic job. In January 1958 he proposed that . . .” read more

Karl Marx’s Children

“In the winter of 1845–6, during which Marx worked with Engels on The German Ideology, Mrs Marx’s brother, the unsatisfactory Edgar, came to stay with the family in Brussels. Though she had disclaimed tender feelings for him, and disapproved of this inveterate sponger of no settled occupation at . . .” read more

E.H.Carr--A Personal Memoir

“In valedictory speeches, and in one or two obituaries of E. H. Carr, the authors—independently of each other—described him as enigmatic. This struck me, and I asked myself why this very English historian seemed so enigmatic to some of his close professional colleagues. In Britain he became, towards . . .” read more

The Death of the 'Chief Ideologue'

“Many Soviet politicians have attracted the attention of the world’s press over the last ten years but very little has been said or written about Mikhail Suslov. He kept himself to the shadows, shunning all publicity. He served neither as a minister nor as Deputy Chairman of the . . .” read more

Wittgenstein’s Friends

“Searching for an epigraph to his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein considered using a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’. ‘Hegel’, he once told a friend, ‘always seems to me to be wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest . . .” read more

'Teachers, Writers, Celebrities': Intelligentsias and Their Histories

“The appearance of Regis Debray’s Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France was a major cultural event in France. Critical reaction was instant and passionate; the book was soon a talking-point and—on a scale appropriate to a book of its kind—a best-seller. But if the public evidence pointed straightforwardly to . . .” read more