James Bloodworth

Rebels with a Cause

Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World

By

William Heinemann 382pp £20 order from our bookshop

Many of the individuals who feature in Jamie Bartlett’s Radicals appear to be in search of a spiritual home. They are, broadly speaking, men and women who live in liberal democracies that have satisfied the basic conditions of life. Yet collectively they find themselves staring into the void that might once have been filled by traditional religion or, more recently, surrogates for it in the form of materialist world-views such as Marxism – the ‘new light’ that seemed to ‘pour from all directions across the skull’, as Arthur Koestler put it.

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