The end of the Megamachine - A Brief History of a Failing Civilisation by Fabian Scheidler is a magisterial book providing a comprehensive picture of the roots of those destructive forces threatening the future of humanity.

Spanning 5,000 years of history, the author explains how the three tyrannies of militarised states, capital accumulation and ideological power have been steering both ecosystems and societies to the brink of collapse.

He says: “We are witnessing how the entire planet, which took four billion years to develop, is being used up by a global economic machinery that produces vast quantities of goods and mountains of refuse at the same time, insane wealth and mass misery, massive overwork and forced inactivity… Today, 42 men possess the equivalent of that owned by the poorer half of the world’s population. It seems that the only remaining goal of the global “Megamachine” is to incinerate the Earth for a small clique of the absurdly super-rich.”
 
There are, though, alternatives to this system. Almost every sector of our society and economy could be reorganised in a different way.

All of the world’s agriculture could be converted to organic farming, which would eliminate a considerable amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

A money system serving the common good could replace the current financial “casino economy.”

A central thesis of the book contends that during the 21st century, the “Megamachine” will encounter two limitations that will be insurmountable when combined.

The first is inherent in the system itself. For about four decades, the global economy has been headed towards a structural crisis that can no longer be explained away by the usual economic cycles. Such crises can set long-term learning processes in motion. And there are important lessons to be learned from the Covid crisis.
 
In the long term, the historical task is to free the state and big business from their interdependence and to make the state an institution obliged to serve the common good. This book is a valuable contribution to achieving that task.

Nick Hayes is doing his bit to change the system as he narrates in The Book of Trespass – A Trespasser’s Radical Manifesto. It is a book that really warms the cockles of my heart.

As a keen nature lover, I’ve spent my life wandering in woods and over countryside that I wasn’t supposed to. In Britain many of the best places for observing nature are still in private hands, but I’ve never accepted the fact that rich individuals can own land and keep others out.

As Woody Guthrie so memorably put it: “This land is your land, this land is my land” from coast to coast.

Here, Nick Hayes celebrates the right of everyone to enjoy our countryside and has illustrated it with his own evocative relief prints.

Hayes believes that the great outdoors should be for everyone. He’s a lifelong trespasser and campaigner for access. By trespassing the land of media magnates, politicians and private corporations, he takes us on a roller-coaster ride through history and demonstrates how the large estates and mansion houses that dominate our landscapes have been acquired by enslaving and robbing the poor over centuries.
 
Under the laws of trespass, we are strangers in our own country, excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of our waterways. Behind these crass statistics lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights. Long live the trespassers.

A very different book is Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy, by Ben MacIntyre. Here, he reveals the astonishing story behind one of the Soviet Union’s top secret agents.

Ursula Kuczynski, alias Sonya, helped changed the course of 20th-century history by handing the Soviet Union the atomic secrets that the US and Britain were so desperate to keep under wraps.
 
Ursula grew up in a privileged household in Berlin. Her father, Robert, was a statistician with strong left-wing views, and all his six children would move further left. Five of them became members of the Communist Party.

As a teenager Ursula became a militant young communist. Her teenage years were marked by the rise of Hitler fascism.

As a young married woman, she travelled to China with her architect husband and there she was recruited into the Soviet secret service by the renowned agent, Richard Sorge.

This was the beginning of an adventurous, highly dangerous, but in the end very successful career as a top agent. She was never caught.

She worked first in China helping Chinese communists combat Japanese aggression, then in Poland and Switzerland monitoring Hitler’s machinations and transmitting vital information to Moscow.

In 1940 she came to Britain where she remained until after the end of the war. She was instrumental in passing vital information from the atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet Union, thus enabling and speeding up its own development of atomic weapons.

MacIntyre’s book is the first full biography in English and includes much new material. He draws the reader in with a gripping, fast-paced narrative of this extraordinary woman’s tumultuous life up until Fuchs is arrested by MI5 in 1949. She is able to slip undetected out of Britain to settle in the GDR.

While MacIntyre is no left-wing sympathiser, he can’t help but reveal his admiration and respect for this woman’s courage, determination and conviction.

A great read for anyone interested in history, espionage and the fight against fascism.