The Vain Conversation : A Novel

To come to grips with the way that artistic trends in Iran can be traced within the intellectual and political landscape of the country mainly from the 1940s to the present, the author has tried to articulate new ideas for relating art to its wider context – whether social, cultural or political – and to bring together critical and historical evidence in order to provide an insight into current artistic concerns. The book explores these underlying themes and discourses through a series of case studies, including through close scrutiny of works of artists.

Together with Marx and Engels on Imperialism, this is the first book to select and bring together Marx’s journalism around a conceptual theme, rather than a mere topic. Whatever the subject — the emergence of a new capitalist politics or the new unionism in Britain, post-1848 Chartism, the East India Company, European nationalisms, or the Taiping Rebellion in China — Marx and Engels’ journalism is shown to constellate around “bonapartism,” a concept that Marx critically appropriated from liberals distressed at the post-1848 order.

Many Struggles answers this call. Edited by one of the field’s leading specialists, Hakim Adi, the book features contributions from an array of emerging scholar-activists. Covering the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, the book reveals the long history of African and Caribbean people in Britain and the wider transformation of the diasporic community. Drawing on important and new archival research, the collection emphasizes often-neglected themes within ‘Black British History’, such as local histories, women, gender, sexuality, and political activism.

This re-evaluation in Russia would have to wait until Napoleon’s death in 1821, but when it came to pass, it continued to occupy the imagination of Russia’s greatest writers for over 130 years. Although Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and subsequent defeat had a profound effect on Russian culture and Russian history, for Russian writers what was most important was the universal significance of Napoleon’s desire for world conquest and the idea of unbridled ambition which he embodied. Russian writers saw this, for good or ill, as potentially determining the spiritual and moral fate of future generations.