Allen Lane

There are two powerful images evoked by the waves of revolutions that broke across Europe in 1848. The first is of ‘the springtime of the peoples’, when scores of popular insurrections overturned the conservative Metternich system of a balance of power between monarchical regimes that had ruled the continent since the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. In France the core demand was popular democracy. Elsewhere, demands for self-determination were linked to dreams of national unity in Germany and Italy, and further to the east to the desire for independence from the Austrian and Russian empires.

For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

Only rarely does a book of political philosophy inspire a media commotion. Well, at least a small stir – glowing reviews in leading British newspapers, BBC interviews, a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, praise from the archbishop of Canterbury. Daniel Chandler, LSE economist and philosopher, is the thinker of the moment.

Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career. 

Katja Hoyer, born in East Germany, was four years old when, on the eve of the state’s collapse in 1989, her parents took her to the Berlin Television Tower and she gazed spellbound from its rotating visitors’ platform at the protesters and police cars gathering in the square below. In this book, Hoyer sets out to show an East Germany that amounted to more than just the Berlin Wall and the Stasi. That now-vanished, would-be-socialist world is presented critically, but also with empathy and the undertone of affection you may feel for something that mattered to people you love.

Two millennia before ‘pretty privilege’ became a TikTok talking point, Publilius Syrus averred, ‘A beautiful face is a mute recommendation.’ The opposite is also true. Facial disfiguration, whether congenital or acquired, can be psychologically and socially debilitating.

This is British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot’s overarching theme in his important new book, Regenesis. While focusing primarily on his native Britain, Monbiot uses a wealth of research – there are almost one hundred pages of notes, and he claims to have read more than 5,000 papers and ‘a shelf of books’ – to argue that the global food production system is in a parlous state. Without comprehensive reform, Monbiot warns, we risk nothing less than the survival of our species.

‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.

A History of Masculinity begins with the observation that we live in a global patriarchy that restricts the rights and freedoms of women, and that remedying this situation is a matter of urgent concern. To that end, ‘we need egalitarian men who care more about respect than power’. Ivan Jablonka acknowledges the accusation that men who are active in the feminist movement simply amplify sexist dynamics by ‘speaking in women’s place, as usual’, only to dismiss it summarily. He believes that a book such as his is vital because the feminist cause is ‘a fight that men have shunned’ until now. He hopes to correct his own failings and encourage other men to be ‘good guys’ in the battle for gender justice.

Shon Faye, trained as a lawyer before moving into advocacy work, brings her multi-disciplinary background into an unflinching look at where trans people in the United Kingdom are now, what lead them here, and where we go next. Consciously forgoing memoir, Faye takes a systematic approach to learning from history, clearly laying out the case for trans liberation.

In the opening pages, we learn of the suicide of Lucy Meadows, a young teacher and a trans woman. As Faye unpicks the immediate and circumstantial paths that lead to this event, we glimpse a tapestry of transphobia that, by the conclusion, is thoroughly unravelled. The introduction presents a litany of trans people (both alive and dead) bearing the brunt of endless scrutiny. The next seven chapters give voice to the conditions faced by trans people, and how we might glimpse liberation through the muck of a transphobic society.