Wednesday 31 October at 7.00 p.m.

Seumas Milne is a columnist and Associate editor on the Guardian, and the author of The Enemy Within, a classic account of the secret war waged against the miners by Britain’s intelligence services during the 1984-5 strike. In his latest book The Revenge of History (Verso) he provides a bracingly alternative history of the last ten years, from 9/11 to the Arab Spring and beyond. The previously dominant account, of triumphant neoliberalism and US hegemony is, he believes a busted flush, and the future is tantalisingly open to negotiation: ‘Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a fundamental shift of wealth and power’, he writes. ‘Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions ... But, as communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered twenty years later, nothing is ever settled.’ Seumas will be in conversation with Karma Nabulsi, a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford and University Lecturer in International Relations.