How the YCL fought apartheid

Luke Tuchscherer meets Steve Marsling, one of the ‘London recruits’ who faced torture and prison on clandestine missions to fight the racist dictatorship in South Africa.

Connolly and Edinburgh’s real, radical underbelly

Louie Gibson writes on the neoliberal sterility of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, contrasting it with the former Edinburgh People’s Festival and the city’s working class history

Poetry Corner: Ballad of Aun, King of Sweden by Hugh MacDiarmid

Ballad of Aun, King of Sweden by Hugh MacDiarmid

Dr Christopher Murray Grieve, who wrote under the pen-name of Hugh Macdiarmid, was the greatest Scottish poet of the twentieth century. Best-known for what he called “Lallans”, a literary form of the Lowland Scots language that he developed, he also made use of English.

At different stages of his life he was a supporter of Scottish nationalism and communism. Famously, he stood for the Communist Party against Tory Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the Kinross & West Perthshire constituency in the 1964 general election, as part of an unsuccessful bid to get television time for the Party. His A Sprig of White Heather in the Future’s Lapel, written for former Communist MP Willie Gallacher on the occasion of the latter’s 80th birthday, is particularly famous among Britain’s Communists.

Here we feature Ballad of Aun, King of Sweden, one of McDiarmid’s strongly political poems.

Women in public: American and Soviet depictions

The depictions of women in the public life in the USSR and America reveal much about the progress of emancipation and liberation

Review: Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre

The biography on Ursula Kuczynski (aka Agent Sonya) by Ben McIntyre is an exciting account of a woman who took many risks as a spy for the Soviet Union whilst being a mother of three children.

Rangers bow out amid Slavia racism row

Thursday nights Rangers V Slavia Prague match ended 1-3 on aggregate with the Czech side going through to the Quarter finals of the Europa League, drawing the Ibrox sides European campaign to a close. However, it isn’t the score line that is being discussed in the aftermath of the game.