By Mark Perryman
Summer is a time for the beach, sunshine, sunglasses and in between whatever takes our marine fancy for a holiday read. A bit of escapism, something for the fast-approaching start of the new football season, a challenge to prejudices old, and new, words to inform, and inspire. My selection for Culture Matters aims to provide all of this, and more.
Red Menace: Joe Thomas
Joe Thomas was a beach read discovery last summer via White Riot, a novel that brilliantly weaved its way around the late 1970s growth of the National Front, a resistance led most spectacularly by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock against Racism. And then into the early1980s featuring the rising number of young black men dying in police custody. It’s a political thriller with a left wing bent, the added twist being it is written from the perspective of a spycop. Red Menace is the second in a promised trilogy, this time taking us from the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham to the Wapping picket line. I’m not sure there’s ever
been novels written with such political insight and rollicking plot lines. A writer top of my
pile, second summer running.
Red Menace from here
Pitch Invasion: Karen Dobres
Karen Dobres is the face, brain and unstoppable energy behind the reinvention of non-league Lewes FC as the global trailblazing Equality FC. To declare an interest, I’m a supporter of Lewes FC and don’t always entirely agree with the detail of the direction Karen would take the club, or indeed football, in. But that’s not the point. It’s the direction that is right, arguing over the detail shouldn’t distract us from that. Where the two collide is the almost unremarked-upon dominance of women’s football by the same ‘big’ clubs as the men’s game. And in the process the almost complete extinction of autonomous women’s clubs of the sort of the glorious Doncaster Belles. Pitch Invasion provides the kind of rounded view that could resist both these unwelcome developments.
Pitch Invasionfrom here
Planet Patriarchy: Beatrix Campbell and Rahila Gupta
Two long-standing feminists, writer Beatrix Campbell and Chair of Southall Black Sisters Rahila Gupta deliver an outstanding and up-to-date analysis of patriarchy, worldwide. Much has changed in and around feminism since the heady days of the 1970s ‘second wave’. But as this politically spiky duo reveal, much hasn’t. Their survey of the inequality and discrimination women face globally proves that but also the enduring commitment to change all this of its foe, feminism. A movement founded on sisterhood, solidarity and resistance. The sheer variety of expressions of this mix the authors uncover quite breathtaking, the scale of what societies produce to deny these women liberation staggering. A potent mix for a powerful read.
Planet Patriarchy from here
The Activism of Art: Dipti Desai and Stephen Duncombe
Stephen Duncombe is one of those rare writers who combines the study of how culture shapes politics with an accessible way of describing how. The often indecipherable language of Cultural Studies academics stripped bare, to produce a new common sense. In his latest book, co-authored with Dipti Desai, these two wonderfully gifted writers chronicle the intersections between art and politics that the sheer scale of the dullness of the conventional versions of ‘doing politics’ from the parliamentary to the protest ignores, at their and our peril. In this regard, a book not simply to read but also to practice.
The Activism of Art from here
Sound System: Dave Randall
If there’s one space where the fusion of the cultural and the political has revealed the popular potential of the mix it is music. Dave Randall is both a professional musician and a skilled interpreter of his mix. In Sound System, sub-titled ‘the political power of music’ he has written an intellectual how-to guide for a movement of change in which a soundtrack is every bit as vital as the more customary baggage of worthy texts. Historical, international and practical, the three ingredients of not only this very fine book but the reasons for the huge impact of the current most obvious example of what the book might aspire to, Kneecap.
Sound System from here
The Fiery Spirits Popular Protest, Parliament and the English Revolution: John Rees
Detailing the leadership and ideas that would lead to the deposing of King Charles (no not that one) and his eventual execution in 1649 (ditto), The Fiery Spirits is a hugely readable account in the tradition of a ‘people’s history’ of Christopher Hill and others. This was English republicanism on the march, at war with all things regal. Yet as John Rees details this was a movement that knew it needed to make allies, to use the inspiration of their republican, revolutionary ideals to inspire others. No, despite the execution, it didn’t end the monarchy but it did strip them of almost all their powers, if not riches. Which left me asking after reading this very fine book, time (minus the execution) to finish the job?
Fiery Spirits from here
A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League (1977-1981): Geoff Brown
If English revolutions are in historically short supply, the same, thankfully, cannot be said of mass movements on these shores that effect social change. In the 1930s the Popular Front against Mosley and his black-shirted British Union of Fascists, the International Brigades who went to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco’s fascists. In the 1950s the rise of CND, in the 1960s the Vietnam War and in the 1970s to stop Apartheid South Africa via stopping their cricket and rugby tours. The Anti-Nazi League absolutely stands in this tradition, as detailed by Geoff Brown in his ‘people’s history’.
Unselfishly galvanised by the organisational skills of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the ANL worked because it was unimaginably bigger and broader than the self-styled ‘revolutionary left’. And everyone could be a part of it, from wearing a ‘School Kids Against the Nazis’ badge, pogoing at a Rock against Racism gig, dishing out leaflets, going on marches and if push came to shove stopping the fascists, the National Front, in their tracks. Geoff Brown chronicles this rich and plural variety which not only makes a very good read but powerfully illustrates all kinds of lessons for how we resist today the rise of the populist right and their attendant far right too.
A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League from here
Palestine A-Z: Kate Thompson
If the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were the movements that provided a generational moment in the late 1970s the Miners’ Strike did the same in 1984-85. The Iraq War 2001- 2005, the student tuition fees protests of 2010, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo (fill the gaps with your own memories and experiences) and now without any doubt Gaza.
This last has by no means ended and the abject betrayal of Palestine by the political and wider establishment, most notoriously by this Labour government, has created a cleavage which won’t be closed in a hurry. But this cannot be an excuse for narrowing the cause to the fully signed-up left. Palestine is absolutely not a left/right issue, the cause crosses all such divisions, it must appeal, not only to those who will march and those who don’t. The potential is huge and broad yet nowhere near reached. Kate Thompson’s delightful A-Z will convince anyone why it needs to, if not, how?
Palestine A-Z from here
Words United: Michael Rosen
I’m pretty sure that Michael Rosen would balk at both labels but uniquely, he combines being both a national treasure and a left populist. The former is easily explained by We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and innumerable other children’s titles that have given so much pleasure to infants who in turn read them to their sons and daughters. The latter? A communicator of causes in verse. And never more so than in the recent past, and present, Gaza. For all the earnestness of speechifying Michael has the ability to connect in a way conventional political communications don’t. No wonder those who should know better rush to stick the label ‘antisemitic’ on his poems for Palestine. A label that says infinitely more about the accusers than Michael, who has written so powerfully of his Jewish upbringing. Taken together this is a most special combination. Words United will serve to inform, inspire and ignite because in the hands of Michael, verses are weapons.
Words United from here
The Leopard In My House One Man’s Adventure in Cancerland: Mark Steel
My five-star beach choice is a comically inspirational real life read out of real-life potential disaster, cancer. No, it doesn’t sound like quite the book for long-awaited summer hols, but in the hands of the one and only Mark Steel anything is possible. Cancer touches the lives of all sorts, ages and sizes, it requires all the skills the NHS can provide to detect and diagnose. The treatment often lengthy, sometimes intrusive. Most cancers can be moderated, few extinguished entirely, some prove lethal. Men on the whole aren’t very good talking about much, or indeed any of this. Mark Steel is, and provides bucketfuls of laughs along the (happy ending alert) road to recovery. A well-deserved five-star absolutely superb beach read.
The Leopard In my House from here
Note No link in these reviews are to Amazon, if you can avoid buying from tax-dodging billionaires please do so.
Mark Perryman His new book The Starmer Symptom is published by Pluto in August, here
