An unashamedly partisan defence of the Bolsheviks entertains but fails to convince

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

China Miéville
(Verso, 384 pp, £18.99)
tablet bookshop price £17.10 • tel 01420 592974

If the devil has all the best tunes, the Right has all the best stories. The great crash of 2008 had its roots in the American sub-prime mortgage market. That had burgeoned from the financial deregulation of the 1980s which was the brainchild of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Yet Thatcher’s party, which was lucky enough to be out of power at the time, sought to blame this global crisis on the then Labour Government’s spending (spending the Tories had until the eve of the crash been promising to maintain should they win any future election). And the story stuck. The Labour Party never came up with a story that explained what was going on in the world – largely because the world is a far more complicated place than the Tories affect to believe.