Title: Thatcher & Sons

Author: Simon Jenkins

Publisher: Penguin

Price: £9.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Margaret Thatcher

Category: Modern Politics

The history of Britain in the last thirty years, under both Conservative and Labour governments, has been dominated by one figure - Margaret Thatcher. Her election marked a decisive break with the past and her premiership transformed not just her country, but the nature of democratic leadership. Simon Jenkins analyses this revolution from its beginnings in the turmoil of the 1970s through the social and economic changes of the 1980s. Was Thatcherism a mere medicine for an ailing economy or a complete political philosophy? And did it eventually fall victim to the dogmatism and control which made it possible?This is the story of the events, personalities, defeats and victories which will be familiar to all those who lived through them, but seen through a new lens. It is also an argument about how Thatcher's legacy has continued down to the present. Not just John Major, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are her heirs and acolytes. And as the Conservative party reinvents itself as a viable political force once again, is the age of Thatcher finally over?

Title: Marxism and Politics

Author: Ralph Miliband

Publisher: Merlin Press

Price: £10.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Karl Marx

Category: Modern Politics

What is class conflict? How do ruling classes and the state reproduce capitalism? What is the role of the Party and what are the differences between reform and revolution? This is a readable and engaging survey: mainly of key Marxist texts - Marx, Engels and Lenin - and of Marxist political experience. Miliband believes in a socialism which defend freedoms already won: and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of class boundaries.

Title: The Chomsky Reader

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: Serpents Tail

Price: £17.50

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: USA Politics

Category: Modern Politics

At the centre of pratically every major debate over America’s role in the world, one finds Noam Chomsky’s ideas - sometimes attacked, sometimes studiously ignored, but always a powerful presence. Drawing from his published and unpublished work, The Chomsky Reader reveals the awesome range of this ever-critical mind - from global questions of war and peace to the most intricate questions of human intelligence, IQ and creativity. It reveals the underlying radical coherency of his view of the world - from his enormously influential attacks on America’s role in Vietnam to his perspective on Nicaragua and Central America Today. Chomsky’s challenges to accepted wisdom about Israel and the Palestinians has caused a furore in America, as have his trenchant essays on the real nature of terrorism in our age. No one has dissected more graphically the character of the cold war consensus and the way it benefits the two superpowers, and argued more thoughtfully for a shared elitist ethos in liberalism and communism. No one has exposed more logically America’s acclaimed freedoms as masking irresponsible power and unjustified privilege, or argued quite so insistently that the ‘free press’ is part of a stultifying conformity that pervades all aspects of American intellectual life.

Title: Stranger in a Strange Land

Author: Gary Younge

Publisher: New Press

Price: £11.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: USA Politics

Category: Modern Politics

Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years working for the Guardian newspaper in New York, Younge has acquired a translantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America. In these pages we take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcrofts's hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of illegal immigrants on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, D.C.

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