The author, Paul Mason, always came across as a thoughtful presenter on the TV, but released from the constraints applied to broadcast news, his unashamed Marxist viewpoint shines through in this history and analysis of the threat of fascism. I found the historical aspects really interesting - we did the Second World War as part of history when I was at school, but there was very limited material on what drove the rise of Fascism and how it operated. I also found Mason's expectation of a second major rise of Fascism and analysis of what to do about it interesting, but in a different way - here it was more an opportunity to see how an intelligent person's thinking can be painted into a corner by his ideology. For example, Mason spends a considerable amount of time exploring why the left failed to stop the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany - but doesn't touch on the more useful potential of why fascism failed to take off in the UK, which would be a far better source of le

Time for a short rant.  I occasionally peruse Apple's News app, which puts stories under topic headings. Recently one such topic was 'Science Fiction' - and it included something about a new Marvel superhero film. In practice, the majority of films that are labelled science fiction are really sci-fi - an approximation to the real thing with very little attention to the science, or for that matter to decent fiction. For that matter, I loved the first Star Wars - but it was a fairy tale with SF trappings, not the real thing. However, the majority of superhero movies are not even bad science fiction. While Iron Man and Batman, for example, just about makes into sci-fi (though in practice they break the laws of physics with painful regularity), the vast majority of superheroes are out-and-out fantasy characters. Their abilities are nothing more or less than magical. There is no possible real-world explanation for them.  Again, this isn't a criticism per se. I enjoy a good