It is a book never wanted to write and one that I wish I never had to write. The story of Downfall is just too raw, too sordid, too dispiriting. Much of Scotland was fascinated by the dramatic twists and turns of the Tommy Sheridan saga, from its first stirrings in a small office in [...]
Over 150 years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called on the working class of all countries to unite and fight for a socialist world. At a time when there were no telephones, no cars, no aeroplanes, no TV and no radio, their internationalist vision represented an extraordinary feat of historical imagination. In today’s world [...]
It was the mid-19th century equivalent of the moon landing, and all Scotland was in state of excitement. In Glasgow, the city bells rang out in celebration of the new dawn that was about to break. In Edinburgh and Stirling, cannons roared their approval from the castle battlements. But the main stage was a lonely, [...]
In the past year, $50 trillion has been wiped from the value of global stock markets, real estate and commodities. Half the world’s wealth has disappeared. “Just like that!” as the late Tommy Cooper might have said. The wine has turned back into water. To talk about wealth redistribution at a time when wealth is [...]
When the first edition of Redemption Song was published in 1999, Muhammad Ali had already been transformed from one of the most feared and reviled figures in sporting history into a harmless icon, a sanitised All-American hero. In the intervening five years, the American ruling classes have reverted to the savagery of the Vietnam years. [...]
A while ago, I was asked by a newspaper journalist some of these random questions they devise to fill in a bit of space. “Who was your childhood hero?” was one of the questions. I resisted the temptation to pretend it was Che Guevara, or some other radical icon of the 1960s. The answer had [...]
From Scottish Review of Books, Volume 2 Issue 4 “Without access to their own history and traditions, how can people breathe?” asks James Kelman in a powerful, uncompromising introduction to this posthumous memoir of an old Red Clydeside warhorse. Kelman first met Hugh Savage on a picket line organised by the Workers City group in [...]
On a rock face at the side of the dusty road that climbs high into the Khyber Pass are military carvings that date back to the 19th century. One of these carvings is the regimental insignia of the now defunct Gordon Highlanders, the regiment traditionally linked with Aberdeenshire. In the lonely cemetery nearby, the inscriptions [...]
A dossier used to justify the invasion of a foreign country so far-fetched it could have been written by JK Rowling. Fearsome weapons of mass destruction that turn out to be more elusive than Lord Lucan. The cold-blooded shooting of an innocent young man following a botched up surveillance operation that would have embarrassed Austin [...]
Not since Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips scandalised respectable society in the 1950s has a pop star provoked such panic. In an editorial which only stopped short of proclaiming Apocalypse Now, Scotland on Sunday on 6 June 2005 warned of “beleaguered Scottish cities”, a “mushrooming threat”, a “crisis on British soil”. Some people might momentarily have [...]