Review of "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime"

Is it possible to hate a book and love (or at least like) it at the same time? This one makes some really important points about the sense of dispossession and displacement that underlies some of the popular support for the new right, and about the vaccuity of the project of modernisation and globalisation that has been the principal objective of both liberalism and neo-liberalism. This is important, and he makes the distinction between "good" internationalism of accepting that we all live on one planet with one atmosphere, and that refugees (especially climate refugees, of which there will be many) are people like us, displaced - and the "bad" internationalism of saying that we can't fight the deregulatory race to the bottom and outsourcing.

And it's something that I not only understand, but feel - I'm aware that I now feel like an ex-Londoner, because London doesn't want people like me and my family any more, but I don't really feel like I belong in small-town Gloucestershire either; many of my friends are also people who moved here from somewhere else, and some of the locals feel aggrieved that I'm part of the trend that makes their town no longer affordable for their kids, and I can see their point. There are great bits about that in the book, and I was delighted to learn about Zadists.

But it's written in the most abstruse, complicated language - and with incomprehensible diagrams that are supposed to illuminate the argument but really really don't. I've had this experience before with Bruno Latour, when I read his stuff about science and the labour process, and later about the embedded social relations of technology like caravels. He's got really important things to say, but it's absolutely not accessible to a lay audience, at least not one of English-language heritage. I wonder whether he's let down by bad translation, but I don't think it's that. It's more that the English and French intellectual traditions are so alien from each other, that even though this book appears to be in English, it isn't. Which rather speaks to his point, if you think about it.

Review of Marilyn Hotchkiss ballroom dancing and charm school

Soppy but quite enjoyable romantic comedy/drama, in which a baker played by Robert Carlyle (but what accent is that even supposed to be?) goes to a dancing school as part of a favour to a dying man, and finds the happiness and love that he's lost after the unexpected suicide of his wife.

Watched on Netflix...or was it Amazon Prime? I don't remember.

Review of Groundhog Day

Just watched this again in the Middle Floor at Springhill (on a DVD) and had forgotten how great it is. Really enjoyed it, in all its feelgood schmaltziness. Bits of it - about how life is capable of perfection if we only had the time, and the inclination - felt very profound, though I wonder if that feeling will evaporate on reflection.

Review of 'On Tyranny; Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century'

If you think that 'totalitarianism' is a useful concept for analysing political systems, that it's useful to compare 'democracies' and 'tyrannys', and that democracy is like pregnancy - you are either are you aren't - then this is the book for you. It will help if you think everything was fine in the UK, and the US, and Europe, before the nasty right-wing populists turned up. Otherwise you might not like it so much.

This couple of sentences stuck out so much I wanted to quote them in full:

"Some spoke critically of neoliberalism, the sense that the idea of the free market has somehow crowded out all others. This was true enough, but the very use of the word was usually a kowtow before an unchangeable hegemony."

So is neoliberalism a useful concept or not? Speaking critically of it is...er, true? Or a kowtow to something?

Review of JoJo Rabbit

A comedy about a kid in the Hitler Youth, whose imaginary friend is Hitler, doesn't sound very promising. I was a little stunned by the trailer - I almost thought it was a spoof, like 'Springtime for Hitler'. But actually this is a very good film, though a little uncomfortable at times - especially at the beginning, where shots of Nazi rallies are overlaid with a Beatles soundtrack. After a while, though, I appreciated the point - the Nazis were people like us, and the rallies were fun and exciting to them in the way that other people enjoy rock concerts.

There's some really good acting in the film, and lots of arresting images. Good to see Rebel Wilson in a better role - she's been in some real dross lately.

This is a 12A, and although there's not much bloody violence there's a lot of tension and some horrible scenes; I don't think I'd take my 12-year old.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill.

Review of 'This is an uprising' by Mark Engler and Paul Engler

I think this is a dangerous book, and not in a good way - in the way that a manual for a difficult and important task with significant mistakes (a bomb-making manual, maybe?) would be.

It purports to be a ‘playbook’ for non-violent revolt, but it isn’t. It’s a partial survey of some mass outbreaks for civil disobedience in the early 21st century, with some partial analysis and some glaring omissions and failures of analysis. 

It starts with an account of the US Civil Rights movement tactics in Birmingham in the early 1960s, and how much impact that managed to create despite - or rather because of - the movement’s weakness in the face of overwhelming repression and violence from their enemies, both in the State government and in civil society. Then there’s a discussion of the difference between two US schools of radical organizing - the tradition of community organising created by Saul Alinsky, and the ad hoc ‘movement on the fly’ tradition attributed to theorist Francis Fox Piven, and a sensible suggestion that the differences might be more apparent than real.

After this there’s a detailed analysis of the successful unseating of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia by a mass movement called Otpor. Bizarrely, there is absolutely no mention of the links between Otpor and the CIA, though I could find them online within seconds. Later in the book there’s a brief reference to the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in the successor states to the USSR, and why they failed - but no indication that the authors know about the deep involvement of the US government. I later found some reference to ‘external funding’ in the footnotes to the discussion about Otpor, but I couldn’t follow it up - and really, that’s not nearly good enough.

The same applies to the discussion (again!) of the work of Erica Chenoweh and Maria Stephan - which is largely a re-presentation, without any critical engagement, of their conclusions that non-violent protest is more effective than violent protest. Others have criticised some of the deficiencies in their methodology so I will hold off that here. But it’s odd to present these two - who are embedded in the mechanics of the US government’s regime change armoury - as either disinterested scholars or as friends of a movement for transformational social and political change. This stuff has a long history - at least as far back as the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in the early 1950s - and ignoring it undermines the good parts of the book.

This absence is little short of breathtaking. There’s been years of work situating the Civil Rights movement in the political context of the Cold War, and analysis of the relationship between the movement and the transformations taking place within US capitalism at the time. But this is simply ignored, in favour of an account that says the movement was successful because it got the tactics right.

There’s extensive coverage of three pivotal mass movements of non-violent action; the Occupy movement; the mass mobilisations against the Iraq war; and the Arab Spring. My take on all three of these is that they are perfect illustrations of the limitations of mass street protests as a political strategy for transformation. The anti-war mobilisation made those of us who took part in it feel better (the awful slogan ‘Not In My Name’ really sums up what this was about) but did not stop, deflect or limit the invasion of Iraq. Occupy got a lot of people involved in politics for the first time (and I heard some rather good talks at the ‘Occupy University’ next to St Paul’s) but it’s really hard to find much legacy, apart from the hand signals thing. The Arab Spring - especially in Egypt - has left almost nothing behind. The same military crony gangsters are in power as before, and the leaders of both the democracy movement and the electorally-oriented Islamists are in jail. 

I can’t say that the book doesn’t address this, because it does - but in a drive-by analysis from the hip sort of way. Yeah, the democracy movement people didn’t have an organisation, or a political program or a strategy for seizing state power, so they lost....Isn’t this what the book ought to be about? Not how to have good demonstrations, but how these can actually lead to a shift in the balances of forces. There is an entire tradition of revolutionary theory and practice that has an answer to these questions - the Bolshevik tradition. I think that it’s ultimately wrong and leads us to a bad place, and its track record is not great - but it is an answer. Reformist socialists have another answer, that nothing else matters except winning elections and thus “getting in to power”; again, a flawed answer, but a coherent one. I don’t see an answer from the authors’ perspective, just a belief that there ought to be one.

Which points to the biggest shortcoming of all; despite the title, this is not for the most part about uprisings. The Civil Rights movement was not an uprising but an effort to get Black Americans a bigger piece of the pie and a seat at the table of political decision making. In another context, Eric Hobsbawm talked about “collective bargaining by riot”, and I think that’s not a bad way to characterize the Civil Rights movement. That’s why it could attract funding and support from corporate think-tanks and foundations, and why it succeeded as far as it went but no further.

There’s a difference between mass protests with a specific and limited aim, and an uprising. Of course one can turn into the other sometimes, either in a planned or an unplanned way; but for those taking part, it’s important to know the difference and what you are involved in. In that way XR is being disingenuous in calling itself a ‘rebellion’ when, despite the occasional fantasy, it does not have any plans to overthrow the state and seize power. It wants to pressure the government to do the right thing; along the way it proposes some important changes to the political process (notably the idea of a Citizens’ Assembly), but these aren’t really any more revolutionary than the people who think proportional representation will fix a dysfunctional political system.

This is not to say that there’s nothing useful in the book. The Englers are decent sorts, not CIA stooges. There are some good thoughts about tactics (though there is something of a tension between the occasionally contradictory suggestions), and especially on the pragmatic adoption of non-violence as distinct from ideological pacifism. There is a good bibliography and pointers towards other literature. But it’s not a playbook for system change, and those using it as such will get themselves into trouble.

Some thoughts about Holocaust Memorial Day 2020

On the 25th of January I joined with my comrades from the Stroud Red Band to play at a Holocaust Memorial Day interfaith event in Rodborough Tabernacle. We’d played at last year’s event too - a couple of antifascist resistance songs including Bella Ciao and Zog Nit Keynmol, and the anthem of the Jewish workers’ Bund, Di Shvue. This year we didn’t get to play Di Shvue, but as a bonus we played ‘The Internationale’ as the congregation filed out.

We were pleased to be included, and we know it’s important to not only engage with our own left-wing ‘bubble’. I know that other band members found the event very moving, and we hope they’ll have us back next year. But there are some things about the event that I find unsatisfactory. This year, in the evening, I was fortunate to join a discussion about why and how we mark Holocaust Memorial Day at Stroud Radical Reading Group, and that helped me to clarify my thoughts as to why I was unhappy.

At the Group we discussed why we should commemorate the Holocaust. There is truth in the idea that failing to do so would dishonour the victims and would be in some sense a victory for the perpetrators, who would have been thrilled by the possibility that their crimes would fade from memory. But I think that there is another reason for commemoration - to learn from what happened, to understand it, so that we can be better prepared to prevent similar crimes in the future and to place roadblocks in the way of the Nazis’ successors.

I think that the event in Rodborough didn’t help that objective. The Holocaust - meaning the Nazi genocide, and other genocides, was commemorated, but in a way that was devoid of everything specific about it. Most of the commemoration was prayers - from a variety of denominations and religious traditions, to God about his loving kindness, and some injunctions that we should all show loving kindness to each other. There was a children’s choir that sang some uplifting songs including ‘Something Inside So Strong’, which I love, and a woman who sung ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ a capella.

I think there is something deeply problematic about all this. The Nazi genocide was not a personal challenge that needed to be overcome through personal resilience. It was not the result of a deficit of loving kindness, or a surfeit of cruelty. Most of the people who participated were not personally cruel, and even leading Nazis regarded the extermination as something that was personally difficult and for which they had to steel themselves. It was the culmination of a thousand years of European antisemitism, and a hundred years of scientific racism and eugenist thinking, and the specific ideology and mass movement of Fascism, to which was added all the power of a modern industrial state and its administrative capabilities. It did not begin with death camps but with small administrative steps of discrimination and separation. Many of the perpetrators were not monsters but people like us, drawn into a mass movement based on nationalism that gave them hope and made them feel good about themselves. If we don’t say these things then we haven’t learned anything that might prepare us to resist the next genocide-in-the-making.

Some of this is perhaps inherent in the way that the Nazi genocide is conceptualised as ‘the Holocaust’. Although this has become the generally accepted term, its use has been contested by some - notably Elie Wiesel. The word ‘holocaust’ means a religious offering that is completely consumed by burning. I think it is worth reflecting on the idea that the Nazi genocide was a ‘sacrifice’ - by whom? To what? And also on whether treating this genocide as primarily an event of religious significance obscures the role of human agency, and the political and historical context - and on what it means to do that.

I’d also like to reflect on the decision to make Holocaust Memorial Day about other genocides, as well as about the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate the world’s Jews. Again, doing this is largely accepted by all those who organise commemorations, and the arguments for doing so are obvious. The Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis. The Nazi genocide was not the first, and it wasn’t the last. If we don’t commemorate those other genocides on Holocaust Memorial Day, when will we? Having separate events for the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, and the Armenian Massacres, and the Africans murdered in the European-organised slave trade, and the many others, would mean that the entire year’s calendar would be full. 

The list of genocides presented at the Rodborough event was very partial and incomplete, as it must inevitably be. But it’s hard to avoid wondering about the basis for selection and for the omissions. Why nothing about the Germans’ extermination of the Hereros of South West Africa, the first genocide of the twentieth century? Why the victims of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture but not the three million victims of the Bengal famine of 1943, which might be laid at the door of the British Empire? Once you begin to set out a list, then every inclusion and every omission becomes significant.

And by having a generic commemoration we lose sight of what was specific about each of them. The Nazi genocide of Jews was unique in its mechanisation and industrialisation, and in the thoroughness of the administrative organisation and its objectives. Informed by ‘race-science’, it was intended to eradicate everyone who was genealogically Jewish, whatever their religious beliefs or cultural identification. 

Relativising this particular genocide has long been part of the stock-in-trade of Nazi apologists; alongside outright denial there is also the suggestion that the Nazi genocide was not so special, that lots of bad things have happened in history...the suggestion that Soviet repression was equivalent is a frequent theme of those who want to whitewash the historical record of the Nazis and their collaborators, especially in Eastern Europe.

So I’d like to make a plea for Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations to be specific, not generic - about the Nazi genocide, and about other genocides too, when we talk about them. Because focusing on the historical context of these terrible events holds out the possibility of learning something, but emphasising the commonality of all of them brings us to a shapeless reflection on ‘inhumanity’ that doesn't take us anywhere.

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was ‘Stand Together’. Let’s think about who needs us to stand with them now.

Review of 'Case Histories' by Kate Atkinson

My first Kate Atkinson book, and on the strength of this I don't think there will be others. I'd heard this one discussed on a book program on Radio 4 and it sounded great, but it wasn't. It captures lots of details about British social and everyday life, but in a way that feels rather sneery, especially about class markers. It also seems a bit cliched, and I don't much like the reported thought speech of some of the characters. The plot elements are nicely developed, and nicely tied up, but it didn't compensate for the slightly uncomfortable feeling that I had all the way through.

Review of Vanity Fair

The 2004 version, with Reese Witherspoon - there have been lots of film versions.

Notable for being a bit more sexy than one might have expected...most of the women wear awful Regency dresses, but Witherspoon somehow manages to look good in hers. And there's a ridiculous set-piece 'Arabian' dance towards the end, in which she captivates the Prince Regent.

Earlier, she sings a song based on Tennyson's sonnet 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal', which was written by the time that the novel was published, but not in the Regency Period in which it is set - and the music seems really wrong for the time period, though rather nice.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Now You See Me'

Upbeat, jolly and enjoyable heist movie, with some not-very-surprising plot twists. Good to look at, and some fun 'Robin Hood' themes - the four magicians are using their trickery to rob bad buys and give the money to...well, to the people who turn up to their shows, who sort of represent the poor.

Some bits don't add up entirely, and I'm also not so sure about representing stage illusions on screen - is there a point?

But quite good fun, and no dozing.

Watched on Netflix

Pygmalion

I read this - I'm not calling this post a review, because GBS does not need any reviews from me. Just noting that I felt a very odd mixture of admiration and loathing in response to Shaw's narrative about class. On the one hand he recognises that speech is a class marker, and that it helps members of the dominant class identify each other and people who are other - and he recognises too that teaching someone to 'speak posh' does not really give them admittance to the dominant class. Some of the discourse about class is very acute.

And he satirises Professor Higgins's callousness towards Eliza - he doesn't care about her as a person, only as an experimental subject. Except that's about him, not his class - his mother Mrs Higgins is much kinder, as is Colonel Pickering, who show kind fellow-feeling towards Eliza, because...well why? Because they are a lady and a gentleman?

And the 'social comedy' of Eliza using her new posh voice to ignorantly speak of things that good manners require that she shouldn't?  And the humorous spectacle of Eliza's father elevated to wealth despite himself? Who is laughing at this, and what do they find funny?

And the fact that the two representatives of the working class are a flower girl and a dustman...more like servants than proletarians?

Review of 'Ship breaker' by Paolo Bacigalupi

Again, one that I meant to write a while ago and then got distracted. This is a rather good dystopian science fiction novel, set in a near-future that's harsher, more resource-constrained and more unequal than our present world...but it's actually pretty much like the world of now. It's particular good on the distance between the super-rich and the people at the bottom, including those who work on shore-based ship breaking; and on the way that outsourcing and subcontracting make a mockery of environmental and other standards. Good plot and characters too, and nice descriptions and settings. Not as good as his others, but still good.

Review of 'Hollywood Bombshell'

Sorry I forgot to finish this review...a nice documentary film about Hedy Lamarr, who was a rather brilliant woman but had a less than brilliant Hollywood career, even though she was beautiful and a good actress. I think it's an object lesson in the importance of image and career management, and of course luck.

Lamarr is also sometimes credited with having invented CDMA, and the film gives a good account of this.

It's a while ago since I watched the film, but pretty sure it was on BBC iPlayer, and that I watched it via phone app and Chromecast.

Review of 'How to Change Your Mind' by Michael Pollan

Good science writing about psychedelics, that made me think a lot about whether I wanted to try them or not, and also about how the mind and brain work. There's a section about the modern history of the drugs, including the scientists who experimented with using them as treatments in the 1950s and early 1960s, and whose research progams were shut down following the exhuberance mischief-making of Timothy Leary...the CIA's MK-Ultra program also gets a mention. There's a discussion about the natural history of psychedelics as they occur in nature - like, why? And a 'travelogue' recounting the author's own experiences, which is honest, nuanced, and not entirely attractive, even though he's pretty sure he benefitted from taking the drugs.

There's a section on the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, which was  interesting and more convincing, and some speculation about the big picture - what does it mean about consciousness and about the universe that these things exist?

I have some entirely amateur thoughts about this - I wonder if the aspect of a memory or an experience that marks it down as 'mine' - as happening to me now, or as having happened to me - is a sort of meta-tag added by the brain, and that my sense of self comes from threading together memory items with that meta-tag. But it's possible for that tag to be added to things that didn't actually happen to me - as when I feel that something is a real memory, even though it didn't happen to me...I've witnessed this sort of false memory in others, and have some experience of it in myself. Conversely, experiences that actually did happen to me might not get the tag for chemical reasons, in which case my experience of selfness would not apply even to things that actually did happen to me - perhaps even at the time they were happening. Hence the sense of dissolution of self and one-ness with everything that some psychedelic users seem to feel.

BTW Pollan is advised not to try MDMA because of his heart issues - a particular shame because I'd like to see how he reacted to that, and how he described it.

Review of 'The Girl on the Fridge' by Etgar Keret

Quirky, disturbing very short short stories...occasionally touching on the politics of Israel and Palestine, but mainly focused on the absurdity and cruelty of normal life. I can't say I enjoyed this, but I appreciate the quality and I'm glad I read it.

Review of 'The People's Act of Love' by James Meek

So jealous of James Meek to have written such a wonderful book - set in Siberia during the Russian Civil War, and focused on the soldiers of the Czech Legion marooned on the Trans Siberian Railway, desperate to escape via Vladivostok but still caught up in the fighting and in the consequences of their actions on behalf of the Whites. With lots more too, including great characters, a complex plot, unreliable narrators, wonderful descriptions of Siberia. Probably the best novel I have read in a very long time.

Review of Red Joan

Judy Dench is usually in good films, and this is one - 'based on a true story', it's really about Melita Norwood, who passed on information to the NKVD and KGB about Britain's nuclear weapons program in the belief that she was making for a level playing field in world politics, and thereby providing the basis for proper mutual deterrence.

It's well made, with allusions to the Cambridge spy ring. It's not that closely based on the real story, though, and reading the Wikipedia article about Norwood is revealing about the mindset of the people who make films. Unlike the fictional Joan Smith, Norwood was already a commited socialist, not someone who had her head turned by glamorous handsome European Communists. Her dad had published a socialist newspaper, and she'd been involved in politics herself for her whole adult life. And she studied at Southampton University, not Cambridge.  And she studied Latin and Logic, not Natural Sciences - maybe they also wanted to make the 'woman making it in the man's world of science' film too...

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Tamara Drewe

Surprisingly enjoyable comedy...not exactly a romcom, more a comedy of manners, with lots of acute observations about various English 'types'. And not exactly a comedy all the time, for reasons that will become apparent if you watch it. Lots of great character actors.

I note in passing that I thought I'd already seen this but I'd actually seen 'Gemma Bovary', an entirely different Posy Simmons graphic novel made into a film.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and the Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain' by Daniel Sonabend

After VE Day in May 1945 the British government lifted the Defence Regulations under which the country’s home-grown fascists had been interned as potential traitors. Some fascists, interned under Regulation 18B, had already been released on ‘compassionate’ grounds, and others had managed to avoid internment altogether; before the war was even over they began to organise, at first through fund-raising to support the wives and children of internees, and then with increasing boldness in more openly political organisations. By the end of December 1945 there were several openly fascist organisations in operation, arranging meetings in halls and on street corners, their captains jockeying for position as they waited for their once and future fuhrer, Oswald Mosley, to return and lead them.

In May 1946 four young Jewish ex-servicemen came upon a fascist platform at Whitestone Pond in Hampstead, chased off the speaker and the stewards, and then rushed to tell others at Maccabi House in West Hampstead what they’d just done. Thus was born the 43 Group, originally an organisation of Jewish ex-servicemen, but soon open to others who weren’t Jewish, or weren’t former servicemen. Women participated as equal members, though none seem to have been part of the group’s leadership. The Group’s aim was to fight fascism, politically and physically, in ways that more cautious and respectable Jewish organisations including the Jewish Defence Committee and the ‘official’ Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX), found unacceptable. 

And fight they did, with their fists, with bricks and bottles and coshes, and with their own publication “On Guard”. Daniel Sonabend’s book, using material including interviews with former group members originally gathered for a documentary film that didn’t happen, tells their story in intricate and affectionate detail. It’s a more thorough treatment than the only other book about the Group, Morris Beckman’s “The 43 Group: Untold Story of Their Fight Against Fascism”, published in 1993 and much more a personal memoir.

Sonabend tells of the efforts to break up fascist marches and overturn street platforms, of vicious fights with fascist thugs acting as stewards and with policemen who were often in sympathy with the fascists, and in any case carried out their duty to protect fascist meetings on the orders of the Labour Home Secretary Chuter Ede. 

Much of the story was familiar to me, because my Dad was a 43 Group member. He had a collection of copies of “On Guard”, and several souvenir brochures from the fund-raising balls that the Group held. As a kid I’d grown up on tales of platforms overturned and street meetings broken up. I knew about the ‘elephant’ - the armoured lorry that formed a mobile speaker’s platform for the fascists - about the ‘aryan squad’ of blond, blue-eyed Jews that infiltrated Mosley’s movement, and about the wheezes the Group pulled, including the time they dressed up as police officers to abduct and beat up one of the fascists.

Like the members Sonabend interviews, for my Dad participation in the Group was the part of his life of which he was most proud. He’d not served in the forces - his father, who had volunteered in the ‘Great War’ and been gassed at Ypres in 1915, had moved heaven and earth to get his only child a job into a reserved occupation - and his involvement in the 43 Group had been his ‘war’. He talked often of the camaraderie and the excitement of participating in street fighting. When the ageing veterans of the Group began to hold reunions in the early 21st century he was excited to attend. He schlepped me along to one, and beamed with delight when his hero, the ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg, told me in his earshot that ‘your father was a real Shlugger’.

But I still found things to surprise me in Sonabend’s book; the extent to which, so soon after the end of the war, the resurgent fascists openly embraced Nazi iconography, slogans and imagery. The participation of actual German Nazis, including an SS man ostensibly in the UK for ‘deNazification’ who marched in the fascists’ drum band, alongside aristocratic fascist sympathizers. The occasional social personal contacts between the fascists and their Jewish enemies - though I’d had a hint of this when, some time during the 1980s, Mosley’s former chief lieutenant Jeffrey Hamm had actually phoned my Dad at his shop to suggest that they met for coffee and to reminisce over old times. The virulence of antisemitism in all strata of British society, including in the working class and within the Labour Party, catalysed by the sharpening conflict between British soldiers and Zionists in late-Mandate Palestine; I hadn’t known about the days of anti-Jewish riots, including smashing of Jewish shops and attempts to burn down synagogues, that followed the Irgun’s execution of two abducted British seargants in August 1947.

I was also - despite myself - shocked by the level of violence that characterized the fighting between the Group and its fascist enemies. I’d participated in anti-fascist demonstrations during the 1970s and 1980s, but I don’t recall seeing anything like the armoury that Sonabend reports - knuckle-dusters, coshes, knives, razors, potatoes studded with razor blades...perhaps men who had only recently used guns and grenades were just less fastidious about lesser weapons.

Sonabend is very good at chronicling the details of the battles against the fascists, from Ridley Road to Brighton and beyond. He’s also very good at describing the conflicts within the fascist parties and grouplets, the maneuvering between Mosley’s would-be deputies, the splits and the betrayals, and Mosley’s increasingly desperate attempt to find a post-Nazi future for his movement as a pro-European, anti-Communist force. I think this analysis actually makes it clear that, despite what the 43 Group thought at the time, there really wasn’t much scope for a fascist revival in Britain in the post-war period. Although there were some hard times in the immediate aftermath of the war and the cruel winter of 1946-7, the economic collapse that Mosley expected did not occur. Britain’s Conservatives did not see the need for a strongman to overthrow Atlee’s Labour government by force, and if they had they probably wouldn’t have turned to an obvious discredited has-been like Mosley.

Sonabend is also good on the politics of the Jewish community, including the tensions between the Jewish establishment and those who wanted to take a more assertive stand against the renaissant fascists. The lines were not always drawn where they might be expected; the Group had allies within AJEX, inside the Board of Deputies, and had support from rabbis of some provincial congregations. Most importantly, they also had support from Jewish-owned businesses large and small, which made donations both openly and secretly, to fund the organisation and the burgeoning legal defence costs.

He’s less good, I think, on the relations between the Group and the left. He does refer to the convergence of actions with the Communist Party, to overlapping membership in the cases of some individuals, and to the organisation of a Communist ‘cell’ within the Group. But he doesn’t give the politics of left wing anti-fascist organisations the same lavish detail that he devotes to the fascists themselves. So there’s no feeling for the twists and turns in Communist Party strategy in the fight against fascism. He’s aware of the extent to which the 43 Group members began to identify as Zionists, so that several of them (including Vidal Sassoon, who’s always been proud of his role in the Group) went to find in the emerging Israel Defence Forces; but he doesn’t seem to know that the period of his story takes place during the brief honeymoon between the USSR, the international Communist movement, and Zionism. This goes some way towards explaining how the Group could so often stand together with Communist fighters, and could actually take a consistent position against racism in America and South Africa in the pages of ‘On Guard’, while steadfastly maintaining that it was ‘non-political’. In his wrap-up of what Group members did next, he talks about those who went on to business and career success, but not those who remained involved in left-wing politics.

It’s mean to quibble too much about what’s not in the book, which already weighs in at some 370 pages. This is a thorough account of the 43 Group and its fight against resurgent fascism in Britain which will stand as the authoritative text for years to come. For me it was also thoroughly enjoyable, bringing back to life my Dad’s stories of his time as a shlugger.

Review of Only You

Really sad film about a nice young couple in Glasgow - he's not very Scottish though his dad seems to be , she's Spanish - who get together, love each other, but can't have children even though everyone around them seems to be doing so.

Not much happens but it's beautifully made and very evocative. Really nice music too.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Yesterday

Nice, feel-good sort of film with a mildly intriguing scenario - following some sort of unexplained discontinuity Jack has a road accident and wakes up in a parallel universe in which The Beatles never happened - only he still remembers them and all their songs, so suddenly he's the greatest singer-songwriter in the world.

Some interesting meditations on success and talent, though the view the film takes is exquisitely conventional - the Beatles were just brilliant, and anyone would have made it with their fabulous songs, whatever their personal connections and characteristics (or lack of them).

Watched on Amazon Prime - I think the first film on Prime that I've actually paid to 'rent'.

Review of 'Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'

Another one in the Almodovar season watched at Jane's shop, the Old Co-op on Horns Road in Stroud.

Very much in the spirit of 'screwball' comedies, with lots of scope for suppressed aggression and sexual jealousy. All your favourite Almodovar actors, and the first one I've seen with a major part for Rossy de Palma (though she was in 'Law of Desire', with her fabulous nose.

Review of 'Wild Honey'

Not very interesting or enjoyable film about a middle-aged phone sex operator, overweight and unattractive and back living with her hyper-controlling mother, who decides to pursue a relationship with one of her clients who seems nicer than the others.

Implausible, not well sustained, and at once painful and dull to watch. But look how many awards it won! Let that be a lesson, about awards.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of 'Wild Rose'

A quite nice film about a country singer in Glasgow - a young single mum with a great voice and stage presence, but no other musical skills (she can't play an instrument, she doesn't write her own songs) who longs to go to Nashville to start her career, but has no money or backers or connections...

She's not very good at life - she's just come out of prison for smuggling heroin into a prison, and the electronic tag she wears doesn't fit well with doing singing stints in Glasgow's Old Opry.

Some nice music (even though I'm not that keen on country as a genre), and good acting. It's not as brilliant or uplifting as some of the reviews suggest, but it was enjoyable and not too downbeat.

Watched on Amazon Prime via Chromecast.

Review of 'Playback'

A very small Chandler novel, with an unusually upbeat ending - but nicely formed and plotted, with good characters and atmospheric settings. The usual crop of corrupt rich people, bent coppers, and so on.

Review of 'The Long Goodbye'

Possibly the best Chandler ever...complex plot (which I'm not sure I entirely followed...), great characters and settings, and an atmosphere of dank, over-ripe corruption that pervades everything. Written in another time and world, but feels very appropriate for our time.

Review of 'Smallpox Hill'

Unusual crime thriller with a GP protagonist, good characters and a rural West Country setting - not the chocolate-box version of the Cotswolds, but the gritty reality of the western side in the shadow of Bristol. This isn't by any means a rural idyll, but the author has a good feel for the landscape, and I also like the descriptions of buildings and interiors.

Nice, taut writing, a tense plot and believable bad guys - and some additional medical details that make the action more interesting and more believable.

Review of 'Funny Cow'

Maxine Peake plays a comedian on the Northern working men's club circuit, with a narrative that flits back and forth during her life and career. It's not a happy or feelgood film, and it depicts well the environment of male violence and abuse that she grown up in. She's ultimately successful as a comic (not really a spoiler as we see this in more or less the opening sequence, in which she returns to look back at her child self) but she does so by participating in the racist, sexist, homophobic culture of the clubs - anything else would have been an ahistorical fantasy, of course. A really good film but not an entirely enjoyable one. The poster makes it look much lighter and funnier than it really is - I can't remember laughing at all.

Netflix - quite a good one, for once.

Review of 'City of Dreamers'

Not very interesting film about a young Irish woman who moves to Brighton after the break-up of a relationship, moves into a house with a nice but weird young man and then meets a succession of other nice young people with whom she builds meaningful friendships. She's a singer-songwriter, and has one bad night singing in an open mike night, busks on the street and makes loads of money because she's really very good (apparently - it's not obvious to me, though she has a nice voice) and then has a good spot at a party.

Inexplicably this film has wonderful reviews, though it's just slightly better than boring. One useful insight though; note to singer-songwriters - do at least two cover versions for every one of your own songs that you sing, and people will love you for it.

One odd thing - the Irish woman doesn't have a mobile phone and spends a lot of her time in phone boxes, calling her mum and making fruitless job-seeking phone calls. This is not explained. Everyone else in the film has phones, so why doesn't she?

Watched on Netflix. Are there any good films on Netflix?

Review of 'Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker'

I keep promising myself that I won't go to another of these, and then I do. This was dreadful, boring, noisy, incomprehensible, and not even much fun to look at. It was murky, the interiors were dull and uninteresting, the worlds weren't very enjoyable (though I did quite like the one with the big waves).

The only saving graces were Alan Driver doing his favourite expression, and Daisy Ridley, who has a nice bone structure and a really nice accent. But that wasn't worth two and a half hours of my life that I will never get back - I couldn't even doze because it was so noisy.

Watched at Everyman in Muswell Hill - very comfy seats but a bit chilly.

Review of 'Gloria Bell

Julianne Moore is a sad, lonely, middle-aged divorced woman. Things are not going too well for her, and the camera lingers on the things that are part of her sadness. But it's not entirely obvious why she's so miserable. She has a good job, which includes health care - this will turn out to be important when she gets a condition later in the film that is non-life-threatening but requires continuing treatment. She has a nice apartment, albeit with noisy neighbours and an annoying ugly cat that keeps finding its way in even though she doesn't like it. She has a good relationship with her grown-up children, and with her ex and his new wife. She goes out dancing with friends, and she picks up men and has good sex with them, though she is looking for a relationship.

For a while I thought the film was heading in to 'Looking for Mr Goodbar' territory. The man she meets is a little bit creepy and might turn out to be a stalker or violent...but he doesn't, he's just a bit inept and still involved with his ex and his daughters - in what actually seems to be quite a responsible way, though he's a bit insenstive to the impact this is having on Gloria.

Ultimately a long, boring, empty film, with lots of long shots that are supposed to be poignant but are actually almost mystifying. I'm not sure whether the things that I took to be signs of the emptiness of American life would be seen thus by an American...as I've noted before, the interior shots of what is supposed to denote luxury just look vile to me. At one point in the film Gloria and the bloke go on a make-up break to Las Vegas...why would anyone with a shred of sensibility go there?

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of A Marriage Story

Really sad film about the break-up of a marriage, and a talented and civilized couple (Scarlett Johanssen and Alan Driver, both acting really well) starting out trying to do the right thing in their separation, but gradually being dragged into a horrible adversarial lawyer-led divorce. Interesting to note that I thought, for most of it, that they were equally to blame, but Ruth saw it much more from the woman's perspective and thought that the man was less sympathetic as a character. Though he does turn out quite rotten as it goes on...

Netflix and Chromecast.

Review of Matador

Another Almodovar, and this one was not just trying to shock, but really quite repulsive...lots of sex-and-death stuff, so that it verges on the snuff movie. Starts out with a woman having sex with a man while killing him, and though at first this seems like a dream sequence, we later learn that this has really happened. Not as much humour as others, and some unexplained/inexplicable plot elements.

Watched at Jane's shop, having been obtained via informal distribution.

Review of 'How Do You Know'

A romcom, and one that got dreadful reviews and bombed at the box office. I quite liked it though...I particularly liked that none of the characters were very likeable, and that it actually intersected the romantic dimension with a reasonable depiction of the world of work and the way people get stitched up there.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast - interesting to note that the quality was dreadful for reasons I don't understand.

Review of 'Fast Color'

I wanted to like this. It's atmospheric, it's dystopian fiction about climate change, all the main characters are Black women...but after a promising start it began to drag. There wasn't enough happening, either in the plot or the character or scenario development. And then it's all resolved by a lot happening all at once, which felt like a disappointment too. As is often the case, the denouement is less interesting than the set-up.

Watched on Netflix on the smart TV.

Review of 'Belle'

Sort of the decolonised version of Jane Austen - young women in the marriage market of the country gentry, but with added issues of race, slavery and illegitimacy. Not bad, but a bit long and occasionally plodding. It felt to me that it rather overstated the significance of the 'Zong' case in ending slavery and the slave trade, but I'm not expert in this.

Oddly no-one mentions that the young woman is never actually called Belle, but usually Dido, presumably after the Queen of Carthage, who I guess they thought of as a noble black person.

Watched via Netflix and Chromecast.

Review of 'The Little Sister'

Possibly the best Raymond Chandler novel ever, and one I hadn't heard of. I found it in an omnibus along with The Long Goodbye and Playback. Really stylish, well-written, with heaps of good characters and a great, complex plot. Everything you want in a Chandler novel, and then some. I must say that I was sometimes confused by the plot, but I think that's part of the attraction.

Review of 'I have lost my body'

A moving French animated film, about a young man and his journey through a life that's sad. There's a surreal element, because we know that he has lost his hand, and the hand is trying to find its way back to him. Usually an animated severed hand is a terrifying thing, but here our sympathies are with the hand as it makes its own journey across a city that might be Paris.

There are some parts that didn't entirely make sense to me - that might be because I missed something, or it might be that the film isn't supposed to be an entirely realistic narrative. What was the place where the hand starts out? There's a fridge full of body parts and eyeballs, but we don't know where it is or ever find out.

But it's a beautiful, poignant and clever film, and I didn't look away or lose engagement for a second.

I note in passing that the young man is Muslim, and that this isn't the point of the story or even a central element. In a British film if a character is Jewish, or Muslim, that has to be the main thing about them; in a French film, not so much, which is great.

Watched on Netflix via phone and Chromecast.

Review of 'Everyman'

Depressing but well-written book about men's ageing and mortality - specifically a man, who is an advertising executive and serial marriage cheater. He's really quite hard to like, but the story is told from his perspective most of the time, so all of his infidelities and bad behaviour seem like natural responses to his life situation rather than choices.

Because he's rich, and his loving health-filled brother even more so, none of the consequences of his failing body are financial...for most people in the US his string of conditions would be devastating and impoverishing, but he's left wondering whether to sell his condo on the Jersey Shore and move back to Manhattan.

There's one memorable speech given to his decent wife that he cheats on with his secretary and then with a Danish fashion model (who subsequently and regretfully marries) that is so good it's worth quoting at length:

"You can weather anything, even if the trust is violated, if it's owned up to. Then you become life partners in a different way, but it's still possible to remain partners. But lying - lying is cheap, and contemptible control over the other person. It's watching the other person acting on incomplete information - in other words, humiliating herself. Lying is so commonplace and yet, if you're on the receiving end, it's such an astonishing thing. The people you liars are betraying put up with a growing list of insults until you really can't help but think less of them, can you? I'm sure that liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you're lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations."

Incidentally, the 'Everyman' of the title is not because the central character is representative of every man, but the name of his father's watch shop - chosen because it didn't sound too Jewish.

Review of 'Libertarias'

A good historical film about anarchists - especially the 'Free Women' - in the Spanish Civil War. It rather plays down the conflict between the different factions on the Republican side in favour of conflicts within the anarchists - over whether the militia should be fully militarized into an army with ranks, over the role of women (whether they should be fighting on the front line or only in support roles). It's really good on the latter, and I think it handles the extent to which the revolution did and didn't address these issues well.

It's quite gory, and I think a little ambivalent on the strong anti-clerical element on the Republican side. The Spanish left really, really hated the Church, seeing it as both an exploiter in its own right and a key ideological and institutional supporter of the rich and the ruling class. During the early phase of the Civil War there was lots of burning of relics, religious art, and church property. This is well depicted in the film, but it wasn't clear to me how the film wanted us to feel about it. The fact that we see much of this through the eyes of a young nun who is sort-of rescued by anarchist militiawomen increases the ambivalence. At one point we see the summary execution of a bishop, and the nun's revulsion.

A good film and worth the two hours spent on it - some great music and crowd scenes too.

Watched in the middle floor at Springhill with the Stroud Red Band after a rehearsal - film obtained by informal distribution.

Review of 'Underground to Palestine' by I F Stone

Well, this is a book of its time if ever there was! I F Stone, a Jewish-American left-wing journalist travels to Europe to see for himself the Aliyah Bet, the illegal Jewish immigration network that stretches from the DP camps  across the Mediterranean to British-controlled Palestine.

It's interesting partly because it fits into another narrative from the one that we're used to be about Zionism and the establishment of Israel. Lots of the displaced Jews are not really Zionists but are heading for Palestine because they see no alternative, and certainly don't want to stay in their countries of origin where antisemitism is still rife. There's no anti-Communism to Stone's story either - quite a few of the displaced Jews fought with the Red Army, and in a number of places the Communists are willing and sympathetic helpers to the would-be emigrants.

The book includes a much-later essay about Stone's position as a pro-peace, pro-Palestinian supporter of Israel, which by the late 1970s he was finding increasingly uncomfortable. Again, very much a piece of its time; Stone wants to reclaim the history of 'the other Zionism', from Brit Shalom to Hashomer Hatzair. I did too, once.

Review of 'The Power' by Naomi Alderman

Well, so much for the suggestion that satire is always conservative (see earlier review of The Twelve Chairs). This is a really powerful, thought-provoking dark book. It's mainly a satire on male power, and has made me feel ashamed at just how much brutality against women that I ignore because it's 'nothing to do with me' - rape, genital mutilation, gang rape in war...all thrown in to relief by making women who are perpetrating the violence against men. In the first few pages I thought 'Oh, I get this...' and wondered how it was going to carry on for a book-length. But it keeps developing, and there are also good characters and plot elements.

There's also more, in the depiction of refugee camps, borderlands, organised crime and trafficking...lots of other cruelties that we just don't think about all that often. And the age of new media, and spin politics. Actually this turned out to be too dark to read at night, because it kept me up.

A really great book. Everyone (but especially men) should read it.

Review of 'The Twelve Chairs' by Ilf and Petrov

I saw the Mel Brooks film years ago, and remember it as quite funny - enjoyable to watch as a socialist, not horribly anti-Soviet and with some jokes that appealled to someone who knew a bit about the history. So I have meant to read the book but never got round to it until I came across a copy on someone's shelf.

It's also quite funny, and quite surprising too. It's set in the late 1920s, which I think is the period of the NEP, so the economic and political situation feels quite fluid, open and a bit unresolved. I read in the afternote that Ilf and Petrov wrote political humour and satire, and never had any trouble from the authorities, and it's not hard to see why - there's really nothing at all anti-Soviet in the book at all. The targets of the humour are a venial priest, a grasping ex-noble, a grifter...all people that the Soviet authorities would be pleased to see ridiculed, as long as it was OK to acknowledge their existence. There's a ridiculous group of anti-Communist conspirators too. I wonder if all satire ends up being small-c conservative, so that in a Communist country it's also pro-regime.

That said, it really is quite enjoyable, well-written, and funny.

Review of 'Dark Habits' (Entre tinieblas)

Another early Almodovar, and was probably quite shocking to a Spanish audience when it first came out, but now seems quite contrived and even a bit annoying. Set in a nunnery where several of the nuns are taken Class A drugs - the Mother Superior is on heroin, one of the others takes acid, and so on. Oh, and there's a tiger in the convent. There's a trashy nightclub singer who takes refuge there and eventually does an inappropriate big number before a visiting clerical dignitary (that bit is actually quite funny) but otherwise it's a bit pointless and shapeless.

Watched via laptop and projector at The Old Co-Op on Horns Road, Stroud - part of Jane's Almodovar season.

Review of Saint Judy

Film about a lawyer who moves to LA so that her divorced husband can have access to their son, becomes involved with a firm that does migration tribunals, and becomes a hero to clients that the firm has more or less abandoned in favour of procedural compliance. It's a true story and provides some insight into the cruelty of the US migration, though there are lots of quite nice people in the system that she meets on the way.

Watched via Netflix app and Chromecast.

Review of 'Catch the Wind'

French film in which a woman whose factory is closed to be relocated to Morocco decides to take up the statutorily-defined offer that she can relocate. Interesting premise, not so well done - actually, the woman has to be pretty dopey to want to turn down redundancy money and do this instead, despite the advice of the shocked HR woman and her co-workers. And she is - she seems to manage life in Morocco fairly badly, not noticing that all the other women on the workplace bus are wearing headscarfs, going off to walk on her own in dodgy parts of town where she gets robbed, and so on. She learns that people in factories in Morocco are treated quite badly, and that women have a hard time in Islamic countries, but eventually finds true friendship because...

Watched on smart TV via Netflix app.

Review of 'Same Kind of Different as Me'

Another awful liberal film about race and class in contemporary. Very wealthy couple have a troubled relationship (he's having an affair) but acheive redemption through volunteering at a downtown mission, where they gradually befriend a troubled older black man who has suffered as a result of terrible racist persecution (KKK violence, among other things). They redeem him, he redeems them, and then she gets cancer and dies but everyone is redeemed (including the husband's racist alcoholic father) through her two-dimensional saintliness. Reminded of the Brecht poem "A Bed for the Night".

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'Seventeen'

Well-made Spanish film about a disturbed young man and his relationships - with his peers (awful), his grandmother (in a home, near-vegetative), his older brother (troubled), and a dog to which the staff at the juvenile facility introduce him (redemptive). Really thoughtful, some unexpected plot twists, and beautiful to look at too.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of 'My Days of Mercy'

Wanted to watch a feel-good cheerful film, and ended up watching this - about the children of a man on death row who attend anti-death penalty execution vigils while hoping that the case against their dad (convicted of stabbing their mum to death) will somehow be overturned by new evidence. Not feel-good at all, despite the Lesbian sex scenes, because the younger of the two daughters strikes up a relationship with a young woman who is a pro-death-penalty campaigner and also attends the vigils to support the executions.

It's a good well-made film, with good acting and a straightforward but well-told story. My overwhelming impression was how awful America is.

How did I end up watching this? The Netflix trailer abstracted a tiny unrepresentative segment of dialogue that implied this was a snappy small-town comedy of manners, and the trailer itself was inserted into a load of others for comedies. Ho hum.

Review of 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women'

A slow start but a good film about academic psychology, sexual relationships and jealousy, and bondage. Lots of bondage. Professor Marston is a Harvard academic and his wife is a much cleverer but less celebrated Radcliffe academic who can't be given a PhD because she's a woman. They do good work together, including inventing the polygraph, but they lose their jobs because of a scandal involving a threesome with a young woman student.

The prof then explores the nature of dominance and submission in sexual relationships, first in theory and then in practice. He discovers the bondage scene, and then starts to write a comic book that eventually becomes the celebrated Wonder Woman series - I had no idea that there was so much bondage in the original comic. I'd been dimly aware of what I thought was a pornographic parody called 'Blunder Broad' by the filthy comic artist Eric Stanton - I didn't realise that the 'parody' was so close in spirit to the original.

Review of 'Unsheltered' by Barbara Kingsolver

I don't think Barbara Kingsolver has written any bad books - this certainly isn't one. It's a sometimes gruelling story about a family of professional Americans tipped into poverty by entirely normal economic circumstances. The father loses his tenured faculty position when the university he works for shuts down, and ends up at the bottom of the ladder in another, worse-paying college. The mother loses her full-time journalist job on a magazine and has to make do on crumbs of badly-paid freelance work. And suddenly they are living in New Jersey in a crappy old house that is literally falling down, and impossible to heat. The man's old racist Greek-immigrant father lives with them, and is dying slowly and very expensively from a constellation of conditions, and the woman who doesn't like him at all has to manage his illnesses and his treatments, and spend huge amounts of time and energy negotiating with American healthcare.

It's a split narrative novel, so there's a parallel story set in the same neighborhood (with similar crumbling houses) in the mid-nineteenth century, which features a progressive teacher trying to engage his pupils with science despite the opposition of the principal and the town's gangster-boss patron.

And it's all the more poignant in that none of the modern families woes come from the familiar 'villains' of the economic apocalypse. There jobs haven't been offshored, they haven't been replaced by robots or immigrants - they are just the victims of middle-class precariousness. It could happen to anybody, and it does.

There's lots of family dynamics, including the golden-prince son who is a Harvard Business School graduate but has no job and heaps of debt, and the less celebrated 'spiky' daughter who has been living in Cuba, and whose smarts from their and from living at the bottom of society have actually prepared her much better for the world that is coming.

No more without the risk of spoilers, but this is really great - just get it and read it.

Review of Julieta

One of Almodovar's more recent films, and really good - very poignant, almost painful to watch, about the relationship between a mother and daughter, its deterioration, and the effect on the mother of the daughter's disappearance. Unlike many of Almodovar's films this is totally devoid of camp or quirkiness, just great acting and directing. Amazing how well actors Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte managed to look like older and younger versions of the same person - I actually thought it was done with make-up!

Based on three stories by Alice Munro, which I must now read.

Watched on BBC4 in real time, as it was broadcast - can't remember the last time I did that!