Chairman Mao remains a polarizing historical figure and key communist thinker alongside Marx and Lenin. The ‘Little Red Book’ is a widely influential text that shaped leftist movements globally, emphasizing the importance of the masses in history. Despite Mao’s controversial legacy, the book’s simple yet profound ideas continue to provoke thought and discussion.
This book is quite old, first published in 1951, it dates from a period when the totalitarian reality of Hitler and Stalin were very much fresh in the mind. Hannah Arendt was a German Jew and this work is both philosophical, enlightening and gives a valuable educated insight into the…
View More Review: The Origins of Totalitariansm – by Hannah Arendt
I read a lot of Russian literature and am becoming a bit of an aficionado. This book was first recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend from Serbia and it’s taken me a while to actually get around to completing it but I finally have done so and can produce this…
View More Review: The Master and Margarita – by Mikhail Bulgakov
‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other classical works such as the Bible, I think that their…
View More Review: War and Peace – by Leo TolstoyThis is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, a first witness account of some of the most important world events of the first half of the twentieth century, a rich period for revolutionary events and the author, Victor Serge, a Belgian born Russian, is perfectly poised…
View More Review: Memoirs of a Revolutionary – by Victor Serge