The curious Marx and us

摘要

Famously since the financial crash of 2008, Marx is back! And the succeeding ten years have been a productive run-up to the bicentenary celebrations (or otherwise) of his birth in Trier in Rhenish Prussia in 1818. Francis Wheen's popular biography came out in a new edition in 2010, followed lately by a stage play ('The Young Marx', 2017) and an art-house movie (Der junge Marx, 2017). Scholarly heavy-weight biographies are now groaning on the bookshelves: Jonathan Sper-ber's A Nineteenth-Century Life in 2013 and Gareth Stedman Jones' Greatness and Illusion in 2017. These latter are in the 700-page zone, just topped by Liedman's A World to Win, originally published in Swedish in 2015. Liedman's text comments on all of these, and he has the presumed benefit of a back-cover endorsement from John McDonnell MP.