Ilya Ehrenburg's The Life of the Automobile is a voice from the past (1929), animating with the startling vivacity of Expressionist detail the then recent history of the motorcar. 'This is not a novel. This is a stock-market bulletin and this is political history,' the narrative insists, racily encompassing, with the zippiness of the horseless phaeton whose resistible rise it charts, the human vistas opening up its connected chapters on the conveyor belt, tires (the translation is American), gasoline, the stock exchange, and roads. We watch the rampageous colonialism of American and European business, the dehumanisation of every link in the auto chain from André Citroën to the Javanese coolie tapping rubber. The car, anti-man, anti-democracy, enacts its destiny of wiping out the world. All in all, a compelling tract for all our times.

Valentine Cunningham, "Naming Names," in New Statesman (© 1977 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd...