Oona King

As Obama fights for re-election this year, I thought it might be a good time to dig out my review of his book

Whatever else people expect from a politician, it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one, possibly because he wrote it when he was 33, long before realising any political ambitions. In essence, this is the search for his lost father who left when Obama was two, and whom he met only once, when he was 10. When Obama was 21 he received a phone call from Kenya telling him his father had died in a car crash. “I felt no pain,” Obama wrote after the call, “only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”

The Black Panthers A collection of photographs by Stephen Shames

The Revolution will not be televised. But if it is, it should star the Black Panthers. The Black Panther Party, one of the most iconic movements to emerge from a century filled with revolution, caught the imagination of oppressed people the world over. Their narrative was of bread and guns. Their imagery was key, and it is fitting that the 40th anniversary is marked by the publication of a photographic history. Stephen Shames, a close friend of founding Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton, photographed the movement between 1968-73, during years of extraordinary social change.