By “People of the Book” it meant principally Jews and Christians. These book-based religions were an intellectual innovation. The book-basis gave Christianity and Islam an expansive power and a cultural breadth that earlier religions had not had.

Eric Lee’s latest column (2 March) contains the occasionally repeated claim that Marx supported the Anglo-French forces in the Crimean War (1853-6).

I think Matt Cooper takes a too narrow definition of “metabolism” as a rather dull process of material exchange that occurs within a cell. From my reading, as a non-specialist, Marx was using the term in a broader sense as the material and ultimately purposeless means by which complex order emerges from disordered matter.

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)