New releases from Joe Wilkes, Honey and the Bear, and Hannah James and Toby Kuhn

While people keep pigeons around the world today, new evidence suggests this tradition is millennia old, says WILL SMITH

Reviews of T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, Tamikrest, and Dub Colossus  

BOB NEWLAND recommends a radio play about the covert action against the apartheid regime

Given the power of the live experience, MIK SABIERS recommends Jon Spencer’s new album

BOB NEWLAND appreciates an important contribution to the debate about how slavery helped to build the wealth of Western companies and states

WILL PODMORE admires an account of the liberation of Berlin that overthrows the conventional US army-inspired account

MARJORIE MAYO recommends a highly useful guide to the benefits and hazards of different approaches to immigration

PAUL DONOVAN recommends a thorough explanation of why Starmer’s Labour travels light on policy, and bending to knee to neoliberalism

KENNY MONROSE recommends a new exhibition that highlights the significance of Black British music

CAYENNA PONCHIONE-BAILEY celebrates a new recording of all the surviving works of a great female composer and equal of Mozart

This right-wing conspiracy theory is used to justify the coercive measures against gender, race and labour rights that best serve capitalism, attests GAVIN O’TOOLE

The bard celebrates two other fine practitioners of the art, and laments a lost brewer

MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja

ANGUS REID is bowled over by an exuberant film about the making of Keith Jarrett’s legendary concert

CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician

by John Chinaka Onyech

TONY BURKE speaks to Malian singer, songwriter and guitarist FATOUMATA DIAWARA

SUSAN DARLINGTON is fascinated by an exhibition that explores a colonial display to reveal the overlooked histories of migration and protest that continue to shape Bradford today

FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within

KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters

Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst

SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change

New releases from World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation, Bjorn Meyer, and Luca Longobardi  

New releases from Rosa Walton, Paul McCartney, and Aidan Thorne & Jason Ball

JONATHAN TAYLOR reviews a collection of short stories wherein news - and the absence of news - changes lives

On the centenary of her birth, JOHN GREEN celebrates the life — and politics — of Marilyn Monroe

NADIA JOSEPH welcomes a survey of the role that TV played in the debate over apartheid and race relations in Britain

ALEX HALL welcomes the memoir of a prominent British academic of Ugandan/Zimbabwean heritage

JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip

RON JACOBS welcomes a sharp, intelligent and witty exposé of the corruption and right-wing politics that have taken over international professional football

GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by Kenneth Branagh’s lightweight Prospero in an ambitious rendition of the play

MARIA DUARTE, JOHN GREEN and ANGUS REID review Power Ballad, Landmarks, My Mother’s Wedding, and Fairyland

MARIA DUARTE recommends a truly immersive crime thriller that explores the consequences of creative paralysis

Chris Searle speaks to bassist PAUL ROGERS

by Abeer Ameer

MARJ MAYO recommends a well illustrated and very positive account of an extraordinary period in local government history

RITA DI SANTO takes us through the prize winners, and takes the temperature of a festival that prioritised narratives of exile, state violence and class division

Do frozen colonists carry the virus of empire? Why is monstrosity a great way to describe capital? Was God a dustman?

ANGUS REID recommends two very different, but very entertaining bands with their last live dates this week

Re-releases from Andy Cohen + Eleanor Ellis + William Lee Ellis, Leon Russell with Mary Russell, and Johnny Winter

MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher  

Rita Di Santo speaks to Hungarian director LASZLO NEMES about his new film, a portrait of the French Resistance leader and hero, Jean Moulin

The Bard does Bearded Theory, and lodges a complaint about bandnames

GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a methodical unmasking of the US media’s complicity in the Israeli genocide, that should be a template for what’s needed to bring Britain’s corporate media to book

ALEX HALL is amused at the way the UFOs appear exactly where commercial interests, conspiracies, militarism and right-wing media overlap

MARTIN HALL examines the way the Roman orator took on different schools of philosophy

TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history