Carlyle, Gabriel

Carlyle, Gabriel

Gabriel Carlyle

1 October 2018Review

Verso, 2018; 192pp; £8.99

In John Carpenter’s celebrated 1988 sci-fi film They Live, a drifter living in a shanty town discovers a special pair of sunglasses which reveal a terrible secret that explains the huge disparities in wealth and power that surround him.

Wearing them, the hero is able to see reality as it truly is: his world is being run by aliens working alongside a wealthy human elite (‘the 1%’). Moreover, the aliens are manipulating ordinary people’s thoughts and perceptions to conceal this…

1 October 2018Feature

A special PN poster to celebrate Germany's WW1 anti-war movement

Richard Muller and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards Image: Emily Johns

On 28 June 1916, Karl Liebknecht – Germany’s most famous anti-war campaigner – was put on trial for treason for his opposition to the war. That same day, some 55,000 munitions workers left their workplaces to march in perfect discipline…

1 June 2018Review

PM Press, 2018; 128pp; $14

PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series continues with this showcase for the writing of the legendary science fiction (SF) writer and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, featuring the title novella, Delany’s famous 1998 essay ‘Racism in Science Fiction’, and an interview with Delany by series editor Terry Bisson.

Clocking-in at seventy-two pages, The Atheist in the Attic centres on the famous November 1676 meeting between the philosophers Leibniz and Spinoza (the latter the atheist…

1 June 2018Feature

Gabriel Carlyle reports from the second UK Fossil Free UK national gathering

At the end of March, I travelled to Stafford to attend the second Fossil Free UK national gathering as a representative of Divest East Sussex – one of scores of local groups campaigning to get universities and local councils to ditch their investments in the fossil fuel industries (coal, oil and gas).

I’d arrived insanely early. Rapidly exhausting the delights of the town centre, I retreated to a bench in Victoria Park, beside the river Sow, where a young man with a guitar…

1 June 2018Review

PM Press, 2017; 128pp; $12.95

According to longtime activist and author Jeremy Brecher, ‘we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. In this short and timely book he attempts to explain how and why this insurgency has emerged and seeks to ‘[lay] out a strategy for climate insurgents in the US’.

The ‘why’ of the insurgency is a relatively straightforward matter. PR aside, governments and corporations have thus far failed to take…

1 April 2018Feature

A Corbyn premiership could open up exciting possibilities for a just transition to a zero-carbon economy

There can be few more dogged campaigners than David Polden.

When I arrived at the Jobs and Climate conference on 10 March at 10am, the start of the 45-minute registration period, the seasoned 77-year-old peace campaigner was already there, distributing flyers to the general public. Believing that the event would start at 10am, David had been there since 9.15am. Given that no one else had arrived during the intervening period, it was a miracle that he hadn’t given up.

1 April 2018Review

OR Books, 2017; 134pp; £12

It’s not always a good sign when the most frequent comment one finds oneself scrawling in the margins of a book is ‘Really?’

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last five-plus years will be aware that today’s digital technologies – first and foremost the internet itself – present wide-ranging challenges to some of our most cherished rights and institutions. Mass government surveillance of the internet threatens our privacy. Google has built an unassailable and unaccountable…

1 February 2018Review

Verso, 2017; 224pp; £14.99

‘By the age of fourteen months,’ George Monbiot writes ‘children begin to help each other, attempting to hand over objects another child cannot reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing some of the things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violations of moral norms.’

We are supremely social mammals, ‘blessed with an amazing capacity for kindness and care towards others’, and yet today ‘an epidemic of loneliness is sweeping the…

1 December 2017Feature

Gabriel Carlyle reviews Lucas Foglia's stunning book of photographs, Human Nature


Evan Sleeping at Camp 18, Juneau Icefield Research Program, Alaska. Photograph courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.

Lucas Foglia, Human Nature
Nazraeli Press, 2017; 92pp; £50

In one of his most famous rants, the comedian George Carlin claimed that: ‘there is nothing wrong with the planet .… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.… The…

1 December 2017Feature

Gabriel Carlyle reports on Pax Christi's recent speaking tour

Riders in a London Bikestormz event, July 2017. Photo: Huck Magazine


2 October is the official UN International Day of Non-Violence (no, I didn’t know either). So what better way to spend it than in London with the folk from Pax Christi, the international Catholic movement for peace, at the first of their four ‘Nonviolence Works!’ seminars? (The other events took place in Leeds, Birmingham and Liverpool.)

Arriving, I bumped into PN contributor Henrietta…

1 October 2017Review

New Internationalist, 2016; 136pp; £9.99

Sean Michael Wilson’s latest non-fiction comic book – written in conjunction with the political philosopher Brad Evans – surveys a wide variety of thinking about violence, by 10 figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon to Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky.

Unfortunately, most of the treatments are – perhaps necessarily, given their brevity – fairly superficial. I suspect that some of the showcased thinkers (for example Judith Butler) have…

1 October 2017Feature

Wadsworth Jarrell's portrait of Angela Davis and a review of Tate Modern's Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

Wadsworth Jarrell, Revolutionary, 1972. Courtesy Lusenhop Fine Art.


Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
12 July – 22 October 2017; Tate Modern; 10am – 6pm daily; £15, £13.10 concessions, under-12s free.

Mark Godfrey & Zoe Whitley
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
Tate Gallery Publishing, 2017; 240pp; £29.99

‘The…

1 August 2017Review

Reaktion Books, 2016; 184pp; £9.95

You could be forgiven for thinking that you already know what’s so controversial about genetically-modified (GM) food.

After all, doesn’t GM food represent a radical break with earlier methods of crop development, producing weird transgenic species (containing genes from different species) that could never occur in nature, posing a dire threat to human health? And hasn’t the introduction of GM crops in the Global South been wholly negative, leading to a dramatic rise in suicides…

1 June 2017Review

Verso, 2016; 160pp; £8.99

Echoing the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, Peter Frase opens this book with the claim that ‘two spectres are haunting the Earth’: ecological catastrophe and automation.

The first is a crisis of scarcity – of fresh water (think melting glaciers), fish (think ocean acidification and overfishing), habitable places to live (think rising sea levels and rising temperatures) and so on. The second is a crisis of abundance – the prospect that our technology could soon…

1 April 2017Review

PM Press, 2016; 128pp; £11.99

Donald Rooum has been drawing cartoons for PN since (at least) 1962, and PM’s new selection of his work – many of them featuring his most famous creation, the anarchist moggie Wildcat – takes on a wide variety of familiar targets: religion, the military, police surveillance, the monarchy and capitalism. But we’re also treated to Rooum’s delightfully offbeat takes on Rumplestiltskin and the Garden of Eden (‘When you’re not blackmailing, you quite turn me on’, the miller’s daughter…