Socialism

Four disparate intellectuals

5 August 2023 9:00 am

Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism

Bisexuality was the Bloomsbury norm

11 June 2022 9:00 am

It’s been a century since the heyday of the Bloomsbury group, and now Nino Strachey, a descendant of one of…

Can Spain save its dying villages?

2 February 2022 11:55 pm

In a little village on the Spanish Meseta, I once asked an old lady about the next village some three…

Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany

6 June 2021 4:01 pm

A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…

Momentum's cunning plan would keep the Tories in power forever

11 April 2021 3:45 pm

Momentum, the Labour campaign group dedicated to keeping Corbynism alive, this week demanded that Keir Starmer commit to introducing a…

Spain's anarchists are rioting

23 February 2021 6:00 pm

Michael Bakunin, the 19th century revolutionary Russian anarchist, identified Spain as the place where his creed was most likely to…

fascism

Fascism: the most abused term in America

25 September 2020 5:34 am

A well-dressed young man walks down the Potsdamer Straße in Berlin, days before the end of March in 1933. He’s…

Coronavirus shouldn't be used as an excuse to expand the state

24 March 2020 2:28 am

Since this is the nearest most of us have ever got to living under the Blitz, I’ve been re-reading George…

The rise – and disastrous fall – of the kibbutz

30 November 2019 9:00 am

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are part of a breed of socialists who argue that this time will be different.…

bernie sanders elizabeth warren

The eve of the Bernie-Warren online battle

21 September 2019 2:59 am

The great ‘Bernie vs. Warren’ online wars have yet to fully commence, and the current state of affairs resembles something…

The next election will be a referendum – on Corbynism

7 September 2019 9:00 am

The next general election will have been precipitated by, and will inevitably be fought over, Brexit. Yet it will also…

dsa

Rise of the comrade babies

7 August 2019 2:15 am

If you elected to build a library dedicated to the subject of Human Folly, the place would end up as…

Let’s choose our politicians by random selection

20 July 2019 9:00 am

Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…

Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to

29 September 2018 9:00 am

It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be…

Illustration of Maduro wheelbarrowing money into a grave with a headstone marked 'Venezuela'

Venezuela’s great socialist experiment has brought a country to its knees

25 August 2018 9:00 am

Imagine if Theresa May suddenly announced that her government was going to devalue the pound by 96 per cent; increase…

The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become

26 May 2018 9:00 am

‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the…

The mystery of socialism’s enduring appeal

23 September 2017 9:00 am

One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the…

India in a day

17 August 2017 1:00 pm

Bold programming by the powers-that-be at Radio 4 meant it was possible to listen to all seven episodes of Ayeesha…

I became a Conservative thanks to a little winged rabbit called Pookie

2 April 2016 9:00 am

His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite…

Maxim Gorky’s revolutionaries are ready for martyrdom

23 January 2016 9:00 am

Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of…

Map of the Island of Utopia, book frontispiece, 1563

Even Corbyn would find Thomas More’s Utopia too leftwing

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook

An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda - which is why the luvvies love it

19 September 2015 8:00 am

What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…

The Tories are now the party of the many — Labour is the party of the few

2 May 2015 9:00 am

When election day dawns, it’s worth bearing in mind that two million more people will be going to work than when…

This election has made me understand how it felt to be a lefty under Thatcher

2 May 2015 9:00 am

On the weekend of 25 April 2015 I started to believe that the party I supported might not win an…

Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree

14 March 2015 9:00 am

In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…