Victor Serge was born in Brussels in 1890 but came to live in many cities. He was, as an outstanding new biography puts it, an “unruly revolutionary”.   Sean Sheehan   His parents were Russian immigrants and, in Paris, their son was drawn into anarchist circles and began writing for […]

History books used to be boring, “one damn fact after another” as someone said, but not “Mexico: A history”.   Sean Sheehan   Written with verve, it will surprise anyone not familiar with the story of the country that had the first black and, later, the first indigenous president in […]

The beginning is Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”, in 1922, and the end comes with his final notes, written between 1949 and 27 April, 1951, two days before his death.   Sean Sheehan   These last notes were brought together in book form and given the title “On Certainty”. New translations of […]

When Israel was created in 1948, Zionists set about ethnic cleansing by expelling Palestinians  – the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) – an endeavour on the part of Israel being currently replayed in Gaza and the West Bank.   Sean Sheehan   “The Lord”, a rare fictional account of life in Palestine before […]

There is a type of conifer, the Trojan horse fir, growing on a mountain in the part of western Turkey that meets the Aegean Sea.   Sean Sheehan   It grows above the plain where the city of Troy stood until, as Homer recounts in the “Iliad”, it was finally […]