Whatever else Surge is, it never seems quite itself. The most prominent way this is the case is that it’s the title both of Jay Bernard’s first full collection and a performance based upon it (a ‘scratch’ version of the performance, Surge: Side A, won the Ted Hughes Award in 2017). Both emerge from Bernard’s archival research at the George Padmore Institute, investigating the records of the 1981 New Cross Massacre: a fire that claimed the lives of thirteen young black people, still... [read more]
Paul B. Preciado, trans. Charlotte Mandell, An Apartment on Uranus
reviewed by A.V. Marraccini
Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus is a manifold queer utopian project against what he calls the ‘necropolitics’ of both the loosely ‘Western’ state and the requisite regimes of the body it necessitates. It is a project that’s eminently clear and accessible. The pieces that comprise the book were originally written for the French newspaper Libération, and are translated by Charlotte Mandell in an equally lucid and public-facing prose. This carries a certain irony given... [read more]
Owen Worth, Morbid Symptoms: The Global Rise of the Far-Right
reviewed by Neil Dawson
In the post-Cold War world, a commitment to free market capitalism became widely accepted as the only legitimate approach to economics and politics. In other words, neoliberalism achieved hegemony. Challenges to this order have emerged in recent years, and as the academic Owen Worth shows in Morbid Symptoms, the most serious have come not from the left, as we might expect, but from the far right, from the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen. Worth’s aims in his book are... [read more]
Annie Ernaux’s I Remain in Darkness is both a new and an old book. It was written from 1983 to 1986, published in French in 1997, translated into English in 1999, and has been republished by Fitzcaraldo Editions in 2019. Its author is a renowned memoirist, at 79 years old the grande dame of French literature. But when she wrote this book she was in her forties, not especially well-known, and yet to win the major prizes that would come to litter her career. As readers of this new edition then,... [read more]
Michael Gove was worried. It was the beginning of 2013. He had been Education Secretary for nearly three years. His friend and patron, David Cameron, had given him huge freedom to implement a radical right-wing programme to transform England’s schools. Gove had fought savage battles and made powerful enemies, but the Education Secretary felt he was making progress. The modern Conservative Party was meant to be all about his ambitious agenda of domestic reform. But now the Prime Minister was... [read more]
Richard Seymour's much-anticipated book about social media takes its title from Paul Klee's Twittering Machine, a surrealist painting which expresses a kind of horror of automation, of birdsong driven by crankshaft. Although it delivers a solid analysis of the driving mechanisms of social media and the commercial imperatives that have shaped them, the insistent focus of Seymour's critique is on the eagerness with which users of these technologies have allowed ourselves to be cast as automata,... [read more]
Clive James, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin
reviewed by William Poulos
The late Clive James had much in common with Philip Larkin. In verse and prose, both men wrote long, complex sentences — sometimes covering a whole stanza — without losing the rhythms of common speech; in verse and prose, both blazed with wit and wrote scores of memorable lines. (James is one of the few critics to recognize this quality in Larkin’s prose. He rightly praises Larkin’s jazz criticism, but Larkin’s literary criticism was just as insightful and well-phrased: “Whether... [read more]
Kit de Waal (ed.), Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers
reviewed by Thom Cuell
In Authentocrats, the critic Joe Kennedy identified a recent trend in populist discourse for appealing to a homogenised idea of the ‘working class’ experience. Taking as a starting point Owen Smith’s disastrous challenge for the Labour party leadership, during which he attempted to display his proletarian credentials by appearing bemused by the concept of ‘frothy coffee’, Kennedy explored the way in which the working class was both fetishised and distorted by politicians such as... [read more]
Quassim Cassam, Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political
reviewed by Alexandre Leskanich
The ‘art of dissimulation’, remarks Nietzsche, ‘reaches its peak in man’. Subsequently:
‘Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendour, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the rule and law among men.’
As discovered with Boris Johnson, a few probing questions quickly... [read more]
Katharine Smyth, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
reviewed by Ben Leubner
Katharine Smyth’s memoir, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, might have been more precisely subtitled, Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, as it is by way of that novel in particular that Smyth attempts to understand certain events in her own life, especially her father’s long struggles with alcoholism and cancer, a combination that cost him his life at a young age. Smyth draws expertly from both Woolf’s life and her entire body of work... [read more]
