ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Lenin, up close and intimate
ANDREW MURRAY recommends two titles that popularise Lenin as a person and revolutionary theoretician and practitioner
COMRADES IN ARMS: A meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in February 1897 (sitting from left) Julius Martov and Vladimir Lenin, (insert) Inessa Armand
[Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya/Public domain]
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
The Lenin Scenario
by Tariq Ali
Verso £12.99
Imperialism and the National Question
by VI Lenin
Verso £14.99
LENIN: THE MOVIE is a film that has never been made, although the raw material is promising enough. Now that the 100th anniversary of the revolution he led and the centenary of his death have both come and gone, it may be that it never will.
Of course, there are doubtless Soviet-era hagiographies out there, and works of higher quality in which Lenin appears. But nothing that tells the story of the man in all its richness.
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