Sumner finds the clearest expression of Macdonald's creative power and of the political thinking that would eventually bridge the "Old Left" and the "New".

A representative selection of interviews with one of the most acute observers of American politics, society, and culture in the twentieth century

This book is the quintessential story of an American awakening. It is the tale of an upper-middle-class white male, schooled in the elite institutions of the WASP establishment, who managed to jettison all of the prejudices and provincialism of his class and through the force of his inquiring mind, to become one of the most penetrating critics of mid-century American civilization.

The Century's Midnight is an exploration of the literary and political relationships between a number of ideologically sophisticated American and European writers during a mid-twentieth century dominated by the Second World War. Clive Bush offers an account of an intelligent and diverse community of people of good will, transcending national, ideological and cultural barriers. Although structured around five central figures - the novelist Victor Serge, the editors Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Norman, the cultural critic Lewis Mumford and the poet Muriel Rukeyser - the book examines a wealth of European and American writers including Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, John Dos Passos, André Gide, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, George Orwell, Boris Pilniak, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ignacio Silone and Richard Wright. The book's central theme relates politics and literature to time and narrative. The author argues that knowledge of the writers of this period is of inestimable value in attempting to understand our contemporary world.

Orwell's Politics is a study of the development of George Orwell's political ideas and beliefs from his time as a policeman in Burma through to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four . It places Orwell's thinking in historical context, examining his response to mass unemployment in 1930s Britain, to revolution in Spain, to the impact of the Second World War and its aftermath. Orwell remained both an anti-Stalinist and a socialist up until his death.

Shortly after it was founded in 1947, the CIA launched a secret effort to win the Cold War allegiance of the British left. Hugh Wilford traces the story of this campaign from its origins in Washington DC to its impact on Labour Party politicians, trade unionists, and Bloomsbury intellectuals