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

Futurism: An Anthology edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman
Yale University Press, £40

Of all the great movements seeking to come to terms with the 20th century, Futurism is the most paradoxical and problematic. Initially, it was challenging and radical. Drawing on ideas from Freud and Marx, the leader of the movement, the Italian writer FT Marinetti, launched his incendiary Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro in 1909. In it, he proclaimed the love of danger, admired courage, boldness and rebelliousness, the beauty of speed and, most difficult, the glorification of war – “beautiful ideas worth dying for”.

Politics and Paranoia by Robin Ramsay
Picnic Publishing, £9.99

The Labour Party, whether in government or opposition, seems to have a pathological inability to deal with the intelligence services. Either this is a fear of being bitten or a sense that the chaps really do know best and Labour should stick to stuff like the NHS.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Other Poems You Half Remember from School edited by Ana Sampson
Michael O’Mara, £9.99

This anthology is not intended, as Ana Sampson makes clear in her introduction, to be a collection of the best poems or poets but, rather, “a nostalgic tour of those half-remembered lines from school as well as the poems and fragments we find, sometimes to our surprise, we can recite”. Nevertheless, she manages to include poems by Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Swift, Pope, Goldsmith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats and Masefield. And, from the last century, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin. Which is pretty comprehensive.