The floodgates holding back anarchy are constantly under strain. The liberal would ease the pressure by diverting some of the water; the conservative would shore up the dykes, the totalitarian would construct a stronger dam.But is anarchy a destructive force? The absence of government may alarm the authoritarian, but is a liberated people really its own worst enemy—or is the true enemy of mankind, as the anarchists claim, the means by which he is governed? Without government the wo...

In the second issue of Arena we aim to provide general insights into the role of the anarchist in fiction, both as protagonist and author.David Weir’s essay “Anarchist Fiction, Anarchist Sensibilities” focuses on the progenitor of anarchist fiction, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, published in 1794, that demonstrated the pressing need for the utopian system he described in the first systematic elaboration of anarchist philosophy, Enquiry Concerning Political ...

A beautifully rendered graphic novel that reads like an adventure story, but with great depth and a plumbing of the human soul. The high production values and color interior will feel like an art book as much as a graphic novel. For fans of Henrik Rehr's Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin Who Ignited World War I, and books like Joe Sacco's The Fixer.

Benefiting from recently catalogued archival materials, The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935–1985 evaluates the influence of an ensemble of well-known Americans born or bred in China – Pearl S. Buck, Henry R. Luce, Owen Lattimore and John Hersey – after their return to the United States of America.The children of missionaries and others serving China, all contributed in significant ways to the globalisation of the American ideal in the 20th cent...

“Stuart Christie's granny might well disagree, given the chance, but her qualities of honesty and self-respect in a hard life were part of his development from flash Glaswegian teenager — the haircut at 15 is terrific — to the 18-year old who sets off to Spain at the end of the book as part of a plan to assassinate the Spanish dictator Franco. In the meanwhile we get a vivid picture of 1950s and early 1960s Glasgow, its cinemas, coffee bars and dance halls as well as the politics of the ci...

Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of contexts. From familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative fiction, this volume tackles a series of related questions regarding how best to understand humanity’s increasing domination of the natural world.

‘1968 and all that’, was, originally, a talk given at Glasgow’s Aye Write Festival in December 2008. It was an attempt on that 40th anniversary to put the events of that year into some sort of political and social context — at least from my personal perspective. In it, however, I posed the somewhat rhetorical question ‘Where are today’s angry young people?’ The answer is, as we have seen across large parts of the capitalist world this summer, they (‘they’ not being just young people) are a...

With the UK’s Foreign Recruitment Act making enlistment in a foreign army illegal, the British authorities became increasingly rigorous in their attempts to enforce non-intervention and implement the law, so Brigaders were recruited discretely through the Communist Party network by local cadres and ‘Spanish Aid Committee‘ organisers who took it on themselves to vet all volunteers, especially non-party members. Politically, around sixty per cent of the Scottish IB volunteers were paid-up CP...

Since the birth of speculative freemasonry in the early 17th century, large numbers of intelligent and otherwise well-informed, sane and sensible people have believed that much of what was happening around them only occurred because it was set in motion by secret societies, the motors of history. Many still believe that virtually everything unpleasant that happens can be attributed to them and that there is an occult force operating behind the seemingly real façade of public and pol...

A speculative look at the culture, history and political role of the Special Air Service Regiment as a warrior elite and ‘parallel enforcement body’ within the British sphere of influence. This article first appeared in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review Vol 1 No 6 (Summer 1982) and was reprinted in its entirety a few months later under the title 'As Others See Us' — at the request of the journal's then editor Major Clarence 'Dare' Newell, in Mars and Minerva, the regi...

Focusing on the literary works and career of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879-1970), this book argues that the writer adapted a much older literary form, the pastoral, to the purposes of writing about modern British experience. The publication points out that Forster's pastoral fiction challenged conventional parameters for the British novel, allowing for the emergence of his subsequent modernist classic, A Passage to India (including its critique of British imperialism). The monograph ...

WITH THE CURRENT centennial chatter on the whys and wherefores of the First World War, not much has been said about the preceding general European social crisis as a force for international tension in 1914. The debate on the origins of the war has long revolved around ascribing responsibility for the bloody conflagration on this or that state or on the breakdown of the standard operating procedures of the various alliance systems of the great powers. 1 The other main focus of historical at...