In 1968, as war raged across Vietnam, the Vietnamese revolutionary popularly known as Ho Chi Minh wrote a new year’s message to the worldwide movement against the US war on the Vietnamese.

One day in 1855, a man walked into a newspaper office in Sydney, Australia, with an odd request. The man, later described as a “man of color” with “bright, intelligent eyes” and an American accent, was looking for a copy of the United States Constitution.

A Nation of Shopkeepers is not your typical sociology book. Rather, it feels like a long letter written by Evans to his fellow leftists about how they’re not “getting” the petty bourgeoisie. It was not always like that. As he shows in Chapter One, Marxist classics – from Marx himself to Trotsky to Poulantzas – paid close attention to the socio-economic and political characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie.

Burnout is now ubiquitous as a term to describe the exhaustion of working too hard in a capitalist world. But, as Hannah Proctor notes in her new book, capitalism does not have the monopoly on this kind of nervous collapse. Burnout is two-sided: it is experienced by those struggling to defeat the system just as much as those struggling to succeed within it.

The eyes of the world were yesterday, for the second year running, on an FA Cup final fought out between Manchester’s two football clubs, their fans festooning Wembley in United red and City sky blue.

A groundbreaking book about LGBTQ+ life and love from the Arab world and its diaspora. A truly unprecedented and eye-opening insight into a community too often ignored from a group of 18 amazing writers. Perfect for those who love great writing, romance, politics and learning. A necessary read for our times.

The collapse of the West’s entire financial system in 2007–08 was, in the era’s terminology, an ‘epic fail’, the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Despite the crash being the direct consequence of centrist deregulation, the elites, having gained better control of the news cycle since Iraq, made the story the economy’s rebuilding as much as its collapse.

All around us we are constructing a vast necropolis, a global city of the dead whose inhabitants might eventually outnumber the living. Who will rule this realm of Thanatos? Who will trim the verges and maintain the buildings to preserve the indefinite afterlife of its citizens? Such are the questions posed in “The Afterlife of Data” by Carl Öhman, a digital ethicist and professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Since at least the 1960s, the art world’s key tenet has been that all art is political. The purpose of artistic practice, therefore, is to change the world. In art school, art theory promotes critical trends such as decolonialism and degrowth. The exhibition programmes of public galleries and museums are as likely to focus on climate change as they are on the plight of migrant workers from the Global South.

In 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.