Ian Parks grew up in a South Yorkshire mining family - as his new volume of poetry The Exile House hits the shelves, Jody Porter finds out his sources of inspiration.
Will Stone was left pondering an incoherent outing
This weekend sees a unique celebration of cinema at Glasgow's Southside Film Festival
Trotsky was a tragic figure of mythical proportions.
First published in 1961, this is a timely reprint given its interpretation of the basic trends of market expansion, territorial conquest and war throughout US history.
The eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's intellectual prowling is like that of a tiger. Invisible in the tall grass of his Leeds retirement, he attentively watches events unfold and at times leaps with enviable precision, giving his prey no chance of eluding the challenge.
As capitalism convulses in its present crisis, there has been a noticeable surge in the publishing world to reprint fictional reflections of previous similar episodes of greed and irrationality.
It is 50 years since John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature and he would have applauded this book, which will surely be recognised as the seminal work on the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers (UFW).
This slim 37-page pamphlet is no manifesto. Instead it gives an excellent explanation in layman's terms of the viciousness of capitalism and how the interlocking parts of the ruling-class strategies - ownership of the means of production, promotion of wars as an extension of politics and control of the media by private capital - come together to batter the masses into thinking that there is no alternative to austerity.
The "It" in this book's title is not just a physical entity - Gaza - it is also a political one. It is an enduring commitment to, almost an enmeshment in, the wider Palestinian cause.
The Map by TS Learner (Sphere, £6.99) is another "mystic quest" chase thriller but it's the first I've read in which the heroes are mostly communists, with the odd anarchist and Basque nationalist thrown in for balance.
Up until the middle of the 19th century the role of the director in theatre production did not as such exist - the practice of one person taking overall interpretive resposibilty for a theatre work is a comparatively recent phenomenon.