News and reviews

Mixing Pop and Politics excerpt in Tribune

Added on 21/05/2024

The collapse of the West’s entire financial system in 2007–08 was, in the era’s terminology, an ‘epic fail’, the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Despite the crash being the direct consequence of centrist deregulation, the elites, having gained better control of the news cycle since Iraq, made the story the economy’s rebuilding as much as its collapse.

The Afterlife of Data reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 21/05/2024

All around us we are constructing a vast necropolis, a global city of the dead whose inhabitants might eventually outnumber the living. Who will rule this realm of Thanatos? Who will trim the verges and maintain the buildings to preserve the indefinite afterlife of its citizens? Such are the questions posed in “The Afterlife of Data” by Carl Öhman, a digital ethicist and professor of political science at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Battle for the Museum reviewed in the Critic

Added on 21/05/2024

Since at least the 1960s, the art world’s key tenet has been that all art is political. The purpose of artistic practice, therefore, is to change the world. In art school, art theory promotes critical trends such as decolonialism and degrowth. The exhibition programmes of public galleries and museums are as likely to focus on climate change as they are on the plight of migrant workers from the Global South.

The Crisis of Culture reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 21/05/2024

In 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.

Shadowland reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

The first jail I ever set foot in was one of the worst in the western world. Pelican Bay State Prison sits on the picturesque California coast, 350 miles north of San Francisco. One of the supermax facilities spawned by the US prison-industrial complex in the 1980s, it is a sprawling 275-acre compound with an X-shaped cluster of concrete buildings at its heart, containing more than 1,000 cells designed for indefinite solitary confinement.

The Lost Princess reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

Two literary-historical paths diverged in a wood. One, the story of fairy tales lined with names such as Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, is familiar to us. The other, the path that Anne E. Duggan treads in The Lost Princess, is paved with names most readers will not recognize: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force and Henriette-Julie de Murat, among others. But this more obscure route was not always the path less travelled.

A Devilish Kind of Courage reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making.

Radio and the Performance of Government reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

During the Nazi Protectorate in Czechoslovakia, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, every radio had a stiff red card slotted in front of its speaker. It showed that the radio had been inspected by an official and that its capacity to pick up shortwave broadcasts from overseas had been removed. The card also issued a threatening reminder: “Remember, remember, that listening to foreign radio is banned and punishable by prison or even death”.

Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism reviewed in Art Review

Added on 17/05/2024

We’ve all felt it. The urge to zoom-in, look-up, take a snapshot of or otherwise possess the world via the screen in front of us. The inalienable itch to get right to the heart of things without delay, to wholly absorb some relatively insignificant subfield of information right now.

Ian Garner writes in the Hub

Added on 15/05/2024

In May 1896, Nicholas II was crowned the last emperor of Russia in Moscow. An elaborately choreographed and opulent display hosted in a Kremlin cathedral affirmed that he was divinely ordained with absolute, autocratic power. Part man and part god. From that moment on, Nicholas was considered all but omnipotent.

Kafka: Making of an Icon reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 15/05/2024

When Franz Kafka died on 3 June 1924, he had published just a few collections of short prose, none of them to much acclaim. The majority of the writing for which he is now known and celebrated, such as the novels The Trial and The Castle, were left unfinished and published posthumously thanks to Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s instructions to burn the manuscripts.

Barbara Comyns reviewed in the TLS

Added on 10/05/2024

Readers have never known what to make of Barbara Comyns. The strange mixture of cheerful irreverence and raw misery in her writing makes it easy to dismiss her as a one-off eccentric or a battle-scarred version of Daisy Ashford. But her air of faux-naïf menace is not just a matter of personal peculiarity. It reflects the experience of a dislocated generation.