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In October 1999 during a trip to Cairo, Cyrus Kadivar, an exiled Iranian living in London, visited the tomb of the last shah, which opened a Pandora's box. Haunted by nostalgia for a bygone era, he recalled a protected and idyllic childhood in the fabled city of Shiraz and his coming of age during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Back in London, he reflected on what had happened to him and his family after their uprooting and decided to conduct his own investigation into why he lost his country. He...

P. M. Jones' The French Revolution, now in its third edition, is an authoritative survey of events in France from 1787, as the power of the ancien regime began to crumble, until 1804 and the demise of the Republic. It provides a balanced and accessible account of the dramatic events of the intervening years, including the fall of the Bastille, the months of the Terror and the journey towards the creation of the First French Empire, are analysed, along with an assessment of the wider significance...

On 17 May 1980, on the eve of Peru’s presidential election, five masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night but not before planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and how brave police investigators and journali...

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an “illness” originating with the French Revolution. The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolution...

There is one country in the Americas that the Bush Administration regards as a significant threat to U.S. interests, and it is not Cuba. Oil-rich Venezuela's democratically-elected government has survived repeated, U.S.-supported attempts to undermine its power, including a short lived military coup. Its leader, President Hugo Chavez, is neither communist nor capitalist, and instead claims to be creating an alternative 21st Century socialism that courts international capital. What is the real st...

In Exit the Colonel, Ethan Chorin, a longtime Middle East scholar and one of the first American diplomats posted to Libya after the lifting of international sanctions, goes well beyond recent reporting on the Arab Spring to link the Libyan uprising to a flawed reform process, egregious human rights abuses, regional disparities, and inconsistent stories spun by Libya and the West to justify the Gaddafi regime's "rehabilitation." Exit the Colonel is based upon extensive interviews with senior US,...

The author of this book has translated selections from the abundant writings of the versatile French political figure and writer Marc-Antoine Jullien, weaving them together with his own extensive commentary into an absorbing narrative of Jullien's life and times. Jullien's hopes and fears for the "progress of humanity" were typical of many of the French bourgeoisie in this turbulent period. His life coincided with the era of revolution in Europe and the Americas from 1775 to 1848. Drawn from boo...

In this book the whole course of the revolt against oppressive British legislation and taxation is recreated. The author shows us the giants who made the Revolution - men like Adams, Jefferson and Washington - and uses original sources to throw fresh light on famous incidents: the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Lexington. But he also brings before the reader six very different people "living on the edge of empire" - from a plantation owner to a slave called Sam,...

Rosa Luxemburg, as leader of a workers' party in Poland, a country divided among three empires - Russian, German and Austrian - had necessarily to take a definite position on the national question. She held to this position from its formulation in 1896 in her first scientific research work, The Industrial Development of Poland, till the end of her life, despite sharp conflicts with Lenin on the subject.

Frantz Fanon (1925-61), author of "The Wretched of the Earth", was one of the great figures of the Third World revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. His angry and eloquent writings on race, racism, psychiatry and anti-colonialism are still of fierce relevance. In the form of "post-colonial studies", his work has become respectable in the academies of the developed world. Born in Martinique, Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in metropolitan France before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. Here, he...