When did the category of teenager, as we comprehend it, come into existence? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to the United States in 1941 and ‘teenage’ to 1921 in British Columbia. In Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, the category as now understood was certainly not available. The age of consent, apart from anything else, was only raised from 12 to 13 in 1875 (and to 16 only in 1885). That alone meant the early teenage years were sharply different from ours. And of... [read more]
David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
‘How did the pollsters manage to get is so wrong?’ has been a consistent question asked in news headlines since the unpredicted Conservative parliamentary majority in the 2015 general election. Leading leave campaigners in the UK’s 2016 EU Referendum appeared just as stunned by the result as those who had voted to remain. In both of these instances, the voting intention polls had offered no evidence that prepared us for the final outcome. Such mystifying circumstances were mirrored in... [read more]
There is very little that the mind feels which the body does not reflect – in heat up the stomach, chill across the skin, weight in your chest. It is no wonder that we are so obsessed with sex, when it allows the connection between the body and the mind to be felt in unified action, when it is a moment where we can lose inhibitions, time, our very selves – plunging into, as Eimear McBride described it recently, the ‘God-knows-where’. It’s impossible to fully narrate the experience –... [read more]
In her recent interview with Ralf Webb in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Berry discusses the problematics of considering poetry as ‘autobiographical’. Berry says:
I reject that term in relation to poetry, because it doesn’t seem to fit. An autobiography is meant to be an account of a person’s life, and, on the whole, you’re not going to get a poem that is a straight description of a person’s life — it’s usually an essence of that.
We settle, then, on a term coined... [read more]
Erik Mortenson, Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture
reviewed by Douglas Field
In ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, (1949) James Baldwin described America as a ‘country devoted to the death of the paradox.’ Writing during the early stages of the Cold War, Baldwin recognised the Manichean structures of US politics and culture which upheld rigid distinctions between black and white, American and Un-American, gay and straight. While Baldwin’s work critiqued such neat divisions for ‘overlooking, denying, evading . . . complexity,’ a number of his contemporaries,... [read more]
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge and one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals. His emphasis as a public intellectual has recently shifted from modern intellectual history to the higher education system, specifically the analysis and critique of the causes and consequences of the Browne Review in 2010. Speaking of Universities follows What are Universities For? (2012), and Collini has also expressed his concern with the direction... [read more]
Nancy Green & Roger Waldinger eds., A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Homeland Connections
reviewed by Susan Burton
I began reading this book in my dentist's waiting room. He's a Swede who commutes to the United Kingdom weekly to tend his NHS practice. Afterwards, I drove into town in my South Korean Hyundai car, which was manufactured in India. I bought some T-shirts in Primark, the labels of which say they were made in Bangladesh. Then I drove home where my neighbours, mostly health workers at the nearby hospital, are German, Singaporean Chinese, Nigerian and Albanian. In the evening, I watched a news... [read more]
When a small press starts a pamphlet series with a publication about a fictional Nintendo Entertainment System character, we know we are entering into the realm of the niche interest. ‘I wonder if I am capable/ of love. I take meals,/inside of me – I don’t make eye contact, /or speak,’ delivers the poem’s speaker, a tiny 2D action figure in the original 8-bit NES game but here in this 'fifteen part persona poem' expressed with a psychology that is human in its neurosis. Lines like... [read more]
Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
reviewed by Lucie Elliott
Whatever happened to Interracial Love? is the title of Kathleen Collins’ collection of short stories and a question posed throughout. The stories were written between 1970 and 1980, published for the first time in the UK by Granta, almost 40 years since their conception and 30 years since Collins’s untimely death at 46. Collins had worked as an editor, a French teacher and Film professor at CCNY; she was also a playwright, known in academic circles as a pioneer in black independent... [read more]
Heads up, Cara Hoffman’s Running is not about that deeply middle-class pastime of putting on trainers and hoofing a 5k with other well-fed, health-minded locals. Running in Hoffman’s book is lying – it’s a hustle – done by a cast of wasters who work the inbound trains, selling unsuspected tourists on low-end hotels in the red-light district of Athens, Greece. In exchange, these kids get a little drinking money and a roof over their heads. It’s a close-to-the-bone existence that... [read more]
