Verso Books

For nearly 2,000 years, London has been a breeding ground for radical ideas, home to thinkers, heretics and rebels. A People's History of London presents fascinating portraits of the heroic idealists who made the city their home. Lindsey German and John Rees bring to life the dissident priest John Wycliff and the Levellers' Civil War struggle. They delve into the travails of the silk weavers, match girls and dockers who crusaded for workers' rights. And they recount the Battle of Cable Street, where East Enders took on Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts. This updated edition recounts the battles of recent years: the Grenfell disaster, the inspiring Palestine movement, and the fight for a city fit for its people, not one hobbled by developers and landlords.

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson picks from the highly charged historiography on the First World War one leading historian from each of the major powers that survived the conflagration: Fritz Fischer, celebrated champion of German war guilt; Pierre Renouvin, a dis­abled serviceman and preeminent authority on the conflict in France; Luigi Albertini, the Italian newspaper tycoon who, unique among scholars of the Great War, played a part in pitching his country into it; Paul W. Schroeder, the American expert on the system of European interstate relations and its breakdown in 1914; Keith Wilson, the one radical deviant from a patriotic consensus about Britain's role in the outbreak of the fighting; and, from Australia (summoned into the war as a dominion), Christopher Clark, acclaimed author of The Sleepwalkers. Disputing Disaster offers a compelling analysis of the major compet­ing versions of the genesis of the Great War; fresh light on the politi­cal background of its leading historians; and a novel synthesis of the determining pressures that brought the conflict to pass.

America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world. But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris and moral failings of the War on Terror, warning of damaging long-range effects on the international system. Schroeder compared 9/11 to the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the First World War, insisting that a great power should never give terrorists a war they wanted. He wrote with extraordinary prescience - months before the US launched its attack on the Taliban - of the 'risks of victory' in Afghanistan, characterised the war in Iraq as a failed bid for informal empire, and called for 'disimperialism' in the Middle East. America's Fatal Leap collects Schroeder's remarkable interventions on America's adventurism in the Middle East, from the 1991 Gulf War to the Surge of 2007. It includes an Introduction by Perry Anderson, author of US Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers and Ever Closer Union?

In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson's countercultural "family" mur­dered some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," most famously Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant at the time. The killers left be­hind evidence intended to implicate Black radi­cals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war. What happened instead was that the gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture un-der suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion's formulation, the end of the sixties. They have been a cornerstone of the true crime genre ever since. Drawing on newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror recasts the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the murders came to be told the way it was. In place of this shopworn narrative, Clau­dia Verhoeven presents a kaleidoscopic history at the center of which is a far stranger portrait of Manson, the man who became the ultimate murder mastermind in the American mythos. Based on years of investigative research, Love and Terror rewrites the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, an event framed by global avant-gardist movements and revolu­tionary violence, and an early sign of our age of spectacle. This history is confused, tumultuous, and pell-mell; it is carnival-esque; and it is a downward spiral into terror that, however, is simultaneously thrilling and repetitively compulsive, which is why the song's refrain about the repeat experience of going up and down the helter skelter is also an apt metaphor for the endless retelling of the murders and the never-ending produc­tivity of the Manson industrial complex/culture industry.

Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe, following the lives and careers of five prominent women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women's activist Elena Lagadinova. In brief conversational chapters, Kristen Ghodsee renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of insurgent left feminist movements around the globe.

In summer 2024, France stood on the brink of a far-right takeover. But the disaster was avoided thanks to a New Popular Front of parties headed by long-standing left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It won the most seats in the snap parliamentary elections, running on a radical, progressive, inclusive agenda, in large part inspired by Mélenchon's presidential programme. Now, the People! details his vision of revolution in our time. In this book, Mélenchon embarks on a survey of human history from its earliest moments to the crisis-ridden present. He outlines his vision for a new strategy for radical parties to reach the highest levels of government and peacefully transform the capitalist system: a citizens' revolution. In this revolution, individuals come together to form a single, politically mobilised people. They assert their power over the collective conditions of urbanised life, against the oligarchy that still controls them.

How the past is memorialized can have a dangerous influence on the future. Monumental Lies exposes the truths buried at contested heritage sites and demands that we safeguard the material evidence of history from both malign defenders and over-enthusiastic erasure. Robert Bevan challenges us to rethink our relationship with our contested spaces, from colonial statues and the physical legacy of fascism, to fake post-conflict reconstructions and ethno-nationalist narratives about beauty and tradition. He questions symbolic power and symbolic changes and explains why wording on a plaque is never a substitute for tackling problem monuments through artistic transformations at scale. A Financial Times Best Book of 2022

The Future in Our Past tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days. Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Churchill feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant. Cant and Lee revisit the communities where the struggle burned brightest, uncovering the lessons the General Strike holds for labour movements today.

After dropping out of college, a young woman wanders through New York both invisible and vulnerable, studying the city's strong magic and longing for a man she knows will never love her back. Salvation appears to arrive when Charlotte Herzfeld, the young wife of a successful businessman, hires her as a live-in nanny to accompany the family on a trip to Berlin. As the Herzfelds begin to crack under the weight of their secrets, she finds herself in a more precarious position than ever before. Reflective yet propulsive, and told in a voice both ingenuous and insightful, Other Women is a timeless and all-too-relatable tale of unwise decisions and unfortunate fixations. This volume includes three new short stories and an introduction from Megan Nolan.

Daniela Russ argues that the category of 'energy' is best understood not in terms of particular material things but as a social relation to nature forged over 200 years of capitalist industrialization. Working Nature examines how engineers, scientists, and economists harnessed and circulated the products of nature despite social and natural resistance.

"Cultural Marxism" is one of the far right's favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil. Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat-a conflict causing real-world damage-can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

John Berger, storyteller, critic and political writer, brings us this tender and bittersweet novel of a man's dreams of freedom and romance. In his sixty-third year, quite unexpectedly, William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, moves out of the house he has shared with his overbearing sister for most of his life. In this poignant tale of a late-life awakening, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness - a man whose fantasies and ambitions are at once splendid and tragic.

Washington Is Burning reveals the inner workings of Trump's Washington - a grotesque carnival of corruption. Andrew Cockburn sets fire to US pieties, focusing on the spectacular greed at the heart of the nation's political system. Graft and self-interest have long typified both Democratic and Republican administrations. Cockburn charts the connections between the American military bureaucracy and the defense industry, which have created a senseless drive for ever-greater spending on arms. After the failed adventures of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon now seeks fresh rewards through inflating the threat from China and Iran, deploying time-tested techniques to boost the budget, including the invocation of supposedly superior enemy weapons development. The American empire has reached a watershed. With Trump back in the White House, Washington Is Burning is a must-read account of unedifying practices in the US capital.

In Women, Resistance and Revolution, Sheila Rowbotham traces four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She reveals how women have confronted the dual challenges of an unjust state system and patriarchal social prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the need for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich and expansive history of radical consciousness. Rowbotham charts the acceleration of feminist activity and theory after the French Revolution, despite the ambiguities of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' for women. She examines pivotal works such as Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Flora Tristan's Workers' Union and Engels's Origin of the Family, showing how women's liberation became a live and often explosive issue in emerging socialist movements. Her narrative spans feminist currents in revolutionary Russia and China, exploring fascinating creative experiments during early Bolshevik rule, and extends to women's roles in anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba and Vietnam. This classic work remains as urgent, vivid and inspiring as ever.

Too many of our convictions about the fifty-four nations of Africa come from non-African sources. Western media often treat the continent as a simulacrum of Western anxieties. In contrast, Jeremy Harding focuses on specific historical episodes and cultural practices - cinema, art, ethnography and journalism - to steer us away from treacherous generalisations. Analogue Africa celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists - and a handful of Europeans - have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among his illustrious cast of filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters are Seydou Keita, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. Harding argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings - the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium - are now the sites of a struggle over the colonial past, adding the latest chapter to an unfinished history.

For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx's work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line - Marx's three volumes and the Grundrisse. This new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader. In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature, fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.