Raphael Samuel

Nov 8, 2024 | versobooks.com | Raphael Samuel |Andreas Malm

After taking power in January 1933, Adolph Hitler immediately eviscerated his enemies. In March, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau, designed specifically for the regime’s political opponents. Their primary target: the Communist Party of Germany. By the end of the year, the Nazis had obliterated what was at one time the third largest communist party in the world. The German communists saw their world collapse.

Aug 14, 2024 | versobooks.com | Tom Nairn |Raphael Samuel |Raymond Williams

As the sun rose on the Summer Solstice of 1792, the Druid-Bards gathered in North London, at the summit of Primrose Hill. Led by Edward Williams, a Welsh stonemason and poet better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, they enacted a series of supposedly ancient Celtic rituals — actually recent inventions, products of Iolo’s febrile historical imagination, helped along by his self-medication with hallucinatory quantities of laudanum.

May 15, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Raphael Samuel |Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups.

Apr 27, 2023 | versobooks.com | Raphael Samuel |Sheila Rowbotham |Tariq Ali

We have waited a long time for this war's All Quiet on the Western Front', wrote the critic V.S. Pritchett in 1948. ‘Here it is.' Pritchett was reviewing the recently-published novel From the City, From the Plough by my father, Alexander Baron (1917-1999). The novel was a fictionalised account of Baron’s experiences as a British soldier in the Second World War. When the book became a runaway success, Baron became a full-time writer.

Feb 21, 2023 | versobooks.com | Raphael Samuel |Tariq Ali |Geo Maher |Friedrich Engels

Today marks the 175th anniversary of the publication of one of the most influential documents in world history: The Communist Manifesto. In this introduction to the new edition, published alongside Lenin's April Theses, Tariq Ali contextualises the period—the eve of the 1848 revolutions—in which Marx and Engels penned their masterpiece and argues that it desperately needs a successor.