Matt Seaton
The Left Quick March
A Future for Socialism
By Bryan Gould
Jonathan Cape 208pp £15 order from our bookshop
Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years on
By Oxford University Discussion Group
Verso 182pp £24.95 order from our bookshop
For two such different books, one by a single author concentrating on the future, the other a collection of many voices assessing and reminiscing about the past, there are unexpected points of contact and mutual illuminations. With contrasting degrees of scepticism and self-assurance, A Future for Socialism and Out of Apathy reflect a sustained argument about the meaning of ‘socialism’ – it almost seems to have shrunk to a struggle over semantics. In the end what remains is an unsavoury choice between the premature triumphalism of a Labour MP with the scent of a parliamentary majority in his nostrils, and the introspective and ritual self-criticism of the New Left’s leading lights who, in Lindsay Anderson’s words, ‘can envisage nothing more clearly than Maggie’s Fourth Term’.
Bryan Gould has established himself as both a moderniser and an intellectual by the standards of the Labour Party (Out of Apathy, as a portrait of the New Left, underlines the profound ambivalence with which socialist intellectuals have regarded
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw