Three great releases of lost concerts by Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Taylor & Stan Sulzman, and Joe Henderson
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Must-read memoir from our woman in Moscow
BEN CHACKO recommends the account of the Morning Star’s correspondent in the last years of the Soviet Union from 1985-90
Kate Clark interviewing Bihojal Rakhimova (Tajik) - Dep. Chair of Supreme Soviet’s Women, Family, Maternity and Childhood Committee, Feb 1990
[Courtesy of Kate Clark]
To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Twilight of the Soviet Union
Kate Clark, Bannister, £14.99
TWILIGHT of the Soviet Union is a breathless read.
As one-time Reuters Moscow bureau chief Bob Evans remarked to her in 1990, Clark has an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time: readers familiar with her earlier memoir Chile in My Heart will know she took up residence in that country just before Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government was elected.
Despatched to Moscow for the Morning Star when the forgettable Konstantin Chernenko led the Soviet Union, within three weeks Mikhail Gorbachev was at the helm and she found herself having to navigate dizzyingly rapid reforms and a torrent of attacks on the Soviet system by its own leadership — for a newspaper, moreover, that had always supported the USSR.
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STEVE ANDREW is intrigued by a timely and well-researched book that demonstrates the conflicted history of the central Asian country
The EIS president who defended Marxist politics in the 1980s fought Thatcherite educational policies while organising Teachers for Peace rallies and ensuring Morning Star circulation in Scotland’s pit villages and factories, writes JOHN FOSTER