John Kelly, Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain
reviewed by Ian Birchall
Among the many moral panics aroused by Jeremy Corbyn's accession to the Labour leadership has been the return of the spectre of Trotskyism. Lord Hattersley has warned that ‘the old gang is back’, referring explicitly to the Militant grouping of the 1980s; Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson has produced ‘evidence’ that Trotskyists were exerting influence within Momentum, the pro-Corbyn organisation. It makes good headlines; whether it bears any relation to reality is another... [read more]
In ‘You and Whose Army’, the penultimate essay in White Girls, Hilton Als writes:
‘We find truth – human truth – by pretending to be people we’re not. That frees us to explore the metaphor of being.’
Als pretends to be several people in White Girls, writing about his subjects with an emotional intimacy that is occasionally provocative but always illuminating. What Als has often referred to as a ‘Stanislavski’ method of writing is what makes the New Yorker theatre... [read more]
James Attlee, Guernica: Painting the End of the World
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Pablo Picasso’s extraordinary commemoration of the bombing of the historic Basque town of Guernica is an iconic image. In Guernica: Painting the End of the World James Attlee explores the work in depth, and shows how the meanings of each figure on the canvas have been remade in every age and place. So powerful are its resonances that when Colin Powell announced the launch of Operation Shock and Awe at the United Nations, where a tapestry reworking of ‘Guernica’ was normally displayed,... [read more]
Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Sillage is a French borrowing adopted by the perfume industry. Originally meaning a ship's wake, it refers to the vapour-trail of scent left in the air when its wearer passes by. Some perfumes have a delectably – or perhaps notoriously – long sillage that appears to cling to and infuse everything in the vicinity, evoking the olfactory equivalent of an electromagnetic image of the departed presence. The long-posited alliance between scent and memory, ratified by investigations in the brain... [read more]
A reader coming to Rachel Cusk’s work for the first time with Transit may find their reception of the book influenced by certain preconceptions. For a writer of novels mostly confined to the safe literary territory of middle-class England and constructed out of spare, minor-key sentences, Cusk has a gained something of a dangerous reputation. She is, we are led to believe, a radical and rager against tradition; a hardened realist whose rejection of artifice might undermine the edifice of... [read more]
Ray, the 34-year-old anti-hero and narrator of Joe Dunthorne's The Adulterants, can't stop thinking about diffusion. Early on, he signals his comfort 'in the abstract' with the idea that 'when we smell something we absorb tiny bits of that smell's source. Fine.' But when his friend Dave 'draws his bottom lip up over his top lip and pulls down remnants of, in this instance, Picpoul de Pinet,' creating a 'fine, near-imperceptible mist of what we can safely assume is a mix of wine and mouth... [read more]
‘Acker’s life was a fable’ says Chris Kraus, author of what 'may or may not be a biography’ of Kathy Acker. After Kathy Acker chronicles the life and work of the punk writer and countercultural icon of the late 70s and 80s. It is an exhaustive but porous account of Acker’s life: her childhood, the fractures within her family, her turbulent sex life, her writing career, through to her untimely death from cancer, in 1997.
Kathy Acker was born in New York in 1944 to middle class... [read more]
I, along with many others, first became aware of New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird when ‘Monica’, a witty, irreverent, and unexpectedly moving poem about the sitcom Friends, was published on The Spinoff in May 2016 and started doing the rounds on Twitter. The poem, which transforms a biting indictment of ‘one of the worst characters in the history of television’ into a meditation on the limitations of happiness and ‘the transitory nature of romantic love’, was as funny as it was... [read more]
Sam Thorne, School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education
reviewed by Bernard Hay
On 9 December 2010, the British Government narrowly passed a bill to treble higher education tuition fees to £9,000 a year, while simultaneously cutting funding for universities under the broader regime of austerity. Only a month previously, tens of thousands of students had marched on Westminster against the proposal, arguing that it would prevent many people from being able to attend university, and further intensify socio-economic inequalities. Passing Downing Street and the Houses of... [read more]
Neil Armstrong hoped that someone, some day, would erase the footprints he had left on the moon. It is in this spirit that American author Russell Persson revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition, covering the explorers’ tracks before loosing his characters into lostness. The Way of Florida, his outlandish debut, begins in medias res like an epic poem: ‘And waiting another day to enter port, a south wind took us and drove us away from land.’ The colonial enterprise – blown off course... [read more]
