Doctorow is both an entertaining author and very much on the right (by which I mean left/anarchist) side of politics. His futuristic utopia is set in a world where people are kept artificially poor in the midst of post scarcity merely to keep the capitalist machine feeting the "zotta" rich. The disenfranchised and those who reject the stupidity of the zotta ideology simply walk away into a squatted pirate utopia. The plaudits on the cover from the likes of Edward Snowden, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson are deserved. A feelgood anticapitalist adventure story.

I am in the process of learning Go at the moment. This is a cute little book with very nice diagrams. In fact the lighthearted graphical style and the fact that the book is, perhaps a little unexpectedly rather thin are the features that initially attracted me to it. The content as well as being presented graphically is communicated accessibly, and in addition to the short chapters, there's a nice list of proverbs and an index.

Alan Moore is best known for his incredible contributions to the world of the graphic novel, or perhaps for the assertion by 90s indie band Pop Will Eat Itself that he "knows the score" in their song "Can U dig it?". This foray into the written word is a new direction for him. First thought was that it was a rather on the verbose side, as somebody who has read the whole of Prousts In Search of Lost Time I'm OK with that, but it did feel rather a slog on occassion. There is a lot of describing streets amongst the undoubtedly rather wonderful time dilation/historical/fantasy novel. If you're in a hurry to get to the end or in need of a gripping thriller, this is probably not the novel for you! Its more of a meditation on history, working class experience and the nature of place.

In a year that has seen a resurgence in the fortunes of the Labour party under a lefter than usual leader it is a good time to remind oneself that the Labour Party has never acted in the interests of the working class as a whole, but only represented the interests of a small section of the privileged working class along and increasingly parts of the middle class. From using the RAF against Kurdish and Indian people, describing African people as "non-adult", usng headhunters against the people of Malaya, breaking strikes, attacking unemployed workers, and overthrowing the Socialist postwar government of Greece, This book catalogues Labour's abnoxious, racist and counterrevolutionary behaviour.

Iserwood’s utterly enthralling account of his years in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic is more social than political history. It captures the feel of the city — its scuzzy drinking holes, the decaying grandeur of its streets and some of the people who inhabit it. Isherwood writes wonderfully and always seems to find the oddball in the lives of the people he chronicles. Of course his characters are all also the people who will be targetted by the Nazis -- vulnerable, marginal, decadent and, sometimes Jewish -- giving the book a haunting and ominous air.