Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism edited by Robin L Riley
Zed Books, £18.99

THE intersection of feminist critique and anti-imperialist resistance to the “war on terror” forms the subject of this illuminating collection of essays. The essential premise of the project is to wrest back from pro-war mainstream discourse a feminism which it had appropriated for the purpose of furthering an imperialist agenda. Feminist geopolitics, as Jennifer Hyndman explains, “aims to recast war as a field of live human subjects with names, families, and home towns.”

The Prime Ministers
Radio 4

BBC political editor Nick Robinson is presenting an eight-part series on British premiers on Radio 4 with useful input from leading contemporary politicos. The Prime Ministers is currently among the best series on offer from the corporation and no one is better placed to be fronting it than its man outside Number 10 Downing Street.

The Blair Legacy edited by Terrence Casey
Palgrave Macmillan, £21.99

THE late George Brown, for the only time in my experience, once said something wise about politics. “A government that gets it right 70 per cent of the time is doing pretty well,” he said. This was not liked by his Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who rarely conceded a success rate of less than 100 per cent. Not in public, anyway.

Vermeer’s Hat: The 17th Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook
Profile, £18.99

TIMOTHY BROOK uses Johannes Vermeer’s paintings from the mid-17th century as doors to open up recognition of the burgeoning trade that led to the first globalization and the emergence of capitalism in Europe. Looking with 17th century eyes Vermeer gloried – in seeding his canvases with the new, the fashionable and the innovative – in the wealth and power of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company) and in particular its Delft chamber. The VOC, the world’s first large joint stock company, was the precursor of corporate capitalism and its unannounced presence broods over Vermeer’s only landscape, View of Delft.