Jeff Sparrow writes that his journey in search of the athlete, singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson is not intended to produce a conventional biography but rather conjure up a ghost story about an incredible 20th century figure who is largely forgotten today. Robeson’s famous rendition of ‘Ol’ Man River’ was familiar to me but I had no idea about his scholarship, political activism or that he was the son of a slave. In 1943 Time magazine named him ‘probably the most famous living Negro’ and yet today most people I ask have not heard of him at all. It is timely then that in an era when there are more African-American men in jail or on parole in the United States than there were men in bondage at the height of slavery and when the Black Lives Matter movement is gathering momentum that there is a book to remind us about this astonishing individual and the political climate in which he used his popular voice to highlight systemic inequality.

Sparrow travels from Robeson’s birthplace in Jim Crow America to the United Kingdom, where Robeson had moved to pursue theatre work but where the Welsh miners’ struggle reignited his passion for politics. From there Sparrow takes us to Spain, where Robeson sang to the International Brigades, and then to Russia, where he said he ‘felt like a human being for the first time’. Robeson’s personal and political journey from civil rights defender to anti-fascist campaigner and his complicated and ultimately tragic relationship with Soviet socialism is both moving and illuminating, particularly in these fraught political times when history once again threatens to repeat itself.

Kara Nicholson