George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara (1905)
Coming down hard on charity and religion, this is often considered the socialist Shaw's most controversial work.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb - A New Civilisation? (1935)
The Webbs' visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was enough to undo their belief in the "inevitability of gradualness". Though for all their credulous admiration of the Soviet experiment, they did acknowledge that Stalin's Five Year Plans were accompanied by a debilitating "disease of orthodoxy".
Bertrand Russell - Unpopular Essays (1950)
A spirited attack on dogmatism on both the left and the right.
G D H Cole - A History of Socialist Thought (1953)
Monumental seven-volume magnum opus by the Fabian, First World War conscientious objector and advocate of the co-operative movement
Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of . . . (1962, 1975, 1987)
Hobsbawm's trilogy on the long 19th century - The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire - is a landmark of Marxist history and exemplar of the author's belief that the historian's task "is not simply to discover the past but to explain it, and in doing so to provide a link with the present". Followed up by The Age of Extremes (1994) on the 20th century.
Martin Amis - Money (1984)
The ultimate satire of the greedy, yuppie Thatcher years narrated by the grotesquely comic, aptly named John Self.
John Pilger - Hidden Agendas (1998)
Ranging from New Labour's Britain to Vietnam and Burma, this is a masterpiece of reading between the lines - and a celebration of the courage of those who resist oppression
Christopher Hitchens - The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001)
A masterful indictment of the former US secretary of state for war crimes, documenting Kissinger's sordid involvement in mass murder in Vietnam, assassinations in Chile, Cyprus and Washington, DC, and genocide in East Timor.
