Great John Maclean has come home to the Clyde : The life and times of Scotland’s greatest socialist

John Maclean was a Scottish schoolteacher, and revolutionary who helped to plant the seeds of Marxism in Scotland. This is the story not just of the man, but of everything that was happening around him: from the rent strikes on the Clyde; to the Hands off Russia protests about Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks; to the twists and turns in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain and to the rekindling of the movement for Scottish independence.

Excellently written, and unafraid to confront the issues of his contested political legacy, this is the most thorough account of Maclean’s life and work I have read. —Ian R Mitchell, historian and author of Walking through Glasgow’s industrial past.