Neither Rick Roberts nor Lee come close to resurrecting Layton or Chow. Roberts’s awkward smiles, for instance, don’t even begin to do justice to the sneaky, playful Layton we all knew. Lee has her moments (especially early on) and might have been able to do a better job in a different scenario but with the wooden role she is given in the script there is no room to bring to life the clever, boisterous and ultra-active Chow that we know.

Mr Putin represents himself as a left-wing politician, but in reality he is rightwing. This is the master stroke of his PR. He wants to reform communal services, education and health, in a most libertarian way.

Unlike too many of the academic scribbles in the social sciences these days, this book is refreshingly light on theory into which the facts must be crammed, and laws to which they must therefore conform. It is a demonstration of how far a historical materialist framework rooted in Marx can take us once the search for immutable laws and certain truths is abandoned. It deserves a wide readership, inside and outside the academy.

The 1960s formed Sixto Díaz Rodríguez but memory of this man fades. The bar where he ostensibly killed himself is gone. His records cannot be found. Yet this forgotten and forlorn man has become, astonishingly, a figure of legend halfway around the world. His bootlegged music echoes in the ears of youthful rebels, haunting lyrics seared into the consciousness of a generation.

Sadly, this “Honest Abe,” along with many known and unknown African Americans and their white allies, failed to make the movie’s final cut. Yet as runaways, soldiers and anti- slavery agitators they helped determine the course of a war, shaped public opinion, pressed Congress to pass laws and Constitutional Amendments, and altered the thinking and actions of America’s greatest icon.

Although tense and hostile relations between law enforcement agencies and inner-city populations cannot be denied, Comack’s project is not about trashing the police or “proving” the existence of racial profiling. She points out that while the work of the police is to maintain order, it is a very particular type of social order — one that has already been organized and sanctioned in the larger society.

Even if the occasional sob story comes off feeling a bit caricatured, the book succeeds in avoiding a descent into histrionics.

We are Legion not only interviews key figures associated with Anonymous but presents a fairly scholarly but riveting account of its origins, much of which should be of avid interest to the left. When so many gray-haired veterans of the left fret over when “fresh blood” will arrive, We are Legion makes it clear that help is on the way even if it does not exactly conform to past expectations.

The Harper Conservatives are going to great lengths to highlight the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, when the British and Americans fought for control over the north. It is in this context that James Laxer has published his history of the war.

Duets for Abdelrazik, a benefit record, is “a meditation on the fact that we live in a country where the government’s actions led to the torture of a Canadian citizen.”