Portside

Harper Lee's classic novel was one of hope, young hope. Her last, Go Set a Watchman, a sad acknowledgment of the incredible power of racial hate in my home state of Alabama, reveals that Atticus turns out to be a Kluxer! An example of how America, especially the American South, has yet to confront, admit, and rectify the original sin of legal racialism enshrined in our founding documents - three fifths of a person.

Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.

The last posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens's essays we are likely to see, the book under review shows the incomparable polemicist moved from being a practicing Trotskyist (though he never practiced enough to get good at it) to cosying up to the Washington neocons.

The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.

The spread of capitalism as a global system and neoliberalism as its dominant economic policy has its analogue in the triumph of English as its undisputed enabling linguistic. The book under review argues that not only is this single-language sway historically unprecedented in allowing universal communication, but that its flattening effects on native languages and national discourse come with their own disabling downsides.

The Guardian is known for it's best of laundry lists. A recent list of the 100 best English-language novels came with a demurrer from culture columnist Rachel Cooke, saying in effect: The ladies not meant for spurning - and that just 20 books by female authors in a best-of-100 list covering a 300-year period--especially in a listing of authors of fiction--is incomplete bordering on bizarre. Cooke elaborates on what should be on, and what she says can surely be removed.

One of the biggest literary stories of the summer has been the controversy over To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee's new novel, Go Set a Watchman. It turns out To Kill a Mockingbird hero Atticus Finch, as portrayed in this new book, was far more racist than fans of Lee's earlier novel remember. Should they have been surprised? Laura Marsh talks to several scholars who say Finch's racism was here all along, if readers had only taken the care to look.

First-time author Leila Abdelrazaq has produced a work that, in the words of reviewer Beenish Ahmed, "provides a human face to the often overlooked experiences of refugees." Rendered in the form of a graphic novel, it is a unique visual and literary testament, and a special glimpse into the world of those who have been displace by conflict from their homes and from their familiar worlds.