If you look around hard enough you can still find small groups of 'comrades' even here in the UK. Clustered together in tiny bands, these Marxist-Leninist true believers still revere the memory of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the rest of the pantheon. They campaign against 'imperialist intervention' in Zimbabwe or show solidarity with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or Fidel Castro's Cuba. Oblivious to the passing of history, or the fact that most leftists have abandoned Marxist-Leninism for more libertarian alternatives or else have taken up the radical environmentalist cause, these small groups are all that remain of a movement that once looked like presenting a young and dynamic alternative to capitalism.

Robert Service, author of acclaimed biographies of Lenin and Stalin, presents a single volume history of world communism - from the days of Marx and Engels, through to Lenin and the Russian revolution, Stalin, Mao's China, Cuba and more right on through to the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. It is a wide sweep, both in terms of time and geography, which means that the book majors on breadth rather than depth, making it ideal for the general reader rather than the specialist.

As well as presenting the historical narrative, Service also explores how it is that communism, in all its national variants, managed to share so many features in common: dictatorship, ruthless ideological dogmatism, corruption, vanguardism and so on. Was this a historical accident that arose from the fact that the Bolsheviks triumphed in Russia and therefore became the blue-print for other communist parties the world over, or was it an inevitable consequence of Marxist theory? [Continued]

Who can be against 'sustainable development'? Surely no one can be in favour of 'unsustainable' development? And thus the discussion is ended. No right-minded individual would admit to being against something that is so self-evidently good and progressive. It's not just development, the word 'sustainable' can be pre-fixed to all areas of public policy and discourse - from sustainable education to sustainable tourism and all points in between.

However, Austin Williams, Director of the Future Cities Project, has clearly had enough. He for one is unwilling to suspend critical faculties when he comes up against the 'sustainable' tag. In this well argued polemic, he takes issue with the very concept. He argues that 'sustainability is an insidiously dangerous concept at odds with progress…[that] represents a pernicious and corrosive doctrine that has survived primarily because there seems to be no alternative to its canon.'

Rather than being a progressive movement, he argues that it is the fetishisation of nature and a retreat from humanism that lies at the heart of the 'sustainable' project. It is indicative of a loss of faith in humanity and the power of humanity to fashion the future in a positive way. Where we once looked forward the future with optimism, now our future is assumed to be something to fear. Doom and disaster is all we have to look forward. Environmental degradation, global warming, climate chaos, over-crowding? this is all that the future holds in store for us. [Continued]

Not by any stretch of the imagination is Bjorn Lomborg a 'climate change denier'. Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist, is not a skeptic when it comes to the theory that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming. He is not a skeptic who disputes the basic theory presented by the IPCC. He makes all of this abundantly clear in Cool It. Life would be simpler for those who want to avoid critical scrutiny of the claims put forward by the IPCC if Lomborg could simply be dismissed as just another 'denialist' who fundamentally disagrees with anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Instead Lomborg accepts the basic theory and then subjects the evidence and conclusions to critical scrutiny. For this he has been attacked and pilloried, for it seems critical scrutiny is not allowed these days. Such is the state of public discourse when it comes to climate change, that only those who accept without questions the revealed truths from Al Gore, James Hansen and the IPCC can be accorded respect. For those who want to really discuss the issues, however, Lomborg provides plenty of food for thought.

Lomborg's arguments are two-fold. First, he assesses the evidence and concludes that the most alarmist of statements simply do not stand examination. Temperature rise, sea-level rise, increased hurricane activity, increased heat deaths and many of the other favourite horror stories trotted out regularly in the media are simply not backed up by the evidence. The evidence is rather mixed and in fact even the IPCC has been scaling down the future horrors that it predicts for some time now. [Continued]

Latest in Savoy's ongoing series of books about Savoy is this Lord Horror sampler and essay, a handsomely bound hardback boasting an Arcimboldo-inspired John Coulthart cover painting of the great man himself. As for the contents, you get four extracts from the Lord Horror books plus Seward's appreciation and a Horror timeline for under a tenner, which brings this as close as Savoy have got to populist publishing since AC/DC and Kiss.

Lord Horror certainly deserves critical appraisal but Seward's tone is altogether too casual for the job and his arguments unlikely to convince any but the converted - or even many of the converted. Much of the essay is written in the first person - 'It's a good name, and I thought Motherfuckers was good too' - and consists mainly of Seward attempting to categorise the Lord Horror books, a daunting and probably pointless task: surely the work's category implosion is itself half the fun? Reiterations of similarities between Horror and works in the accepted canon of Great Art (Burroughs, Swift, Bosch) are swiftly wearying - can't Horror stand on his own daintily shod feet? - and the pretzels Seward contorts himself into while trying to place the morality of the books surely miss the point: if Horror's 'about' anything it's the transformative power of an imagination weaned on Fudge & Speck, rock'n'roll, fascist iconography and unwarranted incarceration.

Seward's final call to arms, for a US publisher to publish the Horror books as a 'nicely designed line of paperbacks' for broader consumption, is baffling - this is never going to be mainstream fare. [Continued]

Christopher Booker, co-author of Scared To Death, responds to questions on global warming, health scares, the mass media and responses to his book in this interview with LondonBookReview.com [Continued]

Nigel Calder, co-author of The Chilling Stars, responds to questions on the controversies surrounding his book, the film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' and offers advice for the lay-person wanting to make sense of the competing theories of climate change. [Continued]

Scared To Death, Human Impacts On Climate and much more …