MARY DAVIS says the centrality of the Jewish community and the Communist Party to anti-fascism in the 1930s is too often overlooked on the left
MALCOLM (Mac) Hulke was a successful writer for television, radio, the cinema and the theatre from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Born in 1924, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in June 1945, not, as he later wrote to a party official, because he was attracted to its Marxist philosophy, but because “I had just met a lot of Russian POWs in Norway, because the Soviet army had just then rolled back the Germans.”
He appears to have remained a member until the late 1960s, although his relationship with the party hierarchy had its ups and downs.
SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a production that looks back at the political Tinseltown in the mid-1970s when US cinema ‘didn’t pander to trends’
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction


