Passages

We talk to Maryam Namazie about Ahmad Shamlou's In This Dead End, which describes the suppression and violence that occurred in Iran after religious leaders took power in the wake of the country's revolution in 1979.

Clare Fisher on Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the character Mick, a 12-year-old tomboy living in a mill town in 1930s Georgia who befriends a deaf-mute after he moves into her parents' boarding house.

John Lloyd on Robert Burns's A Man's a Man For A' That, his endurance as an egalitarian figure, and Scotland's equivocal place in the United Kingdom.

Rafael Behr on Wilfred Owen's The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, which explores the theme of political vanity as a catalyst for the First World War.