Labour’s radical soil
Scottish Labour needs to offer the kind of practical, transformative radicalism that helps people where they need it most.
A strange space odyssey
A brief review of a strange little space odyssey prompted by BBC4’s excellent documentary Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race, still available at the time of writing on the iPlayer.
London, past and future city
The stars finally came into alignment and I was able to take a brief trip to London last week to see a couple of exhibitions. They were excellent, and I’ll have a few things to say about them here when thoughts crystalise. But as ever with London, I also wanted to go just to wander and watch, to sink into the city.
Eisenstein’s kaleidoscope
Notes on a rare showing of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.
Engineering utopia
Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is not just any old history of post-war Soviet cybernetic mathematical modelling. This is an account of centrally administered resource allocation quite unlike any other.
European futures
Two new books written by very different authors, from very different worlds, argue that – despite everything – the EU still offers a credible framework for the advancement of progressive political purposes if critical design flaws in the mechanisms of the eurozone can be fixed, and its economic policy can be turned from austerity towards expansion.