Harry Leslie Smith, Harry's Last Stand: How the World My Generation Built is Falling Down, and What We Can Do To Save It
reviewed by Stephen Lee Naish
Over the next few months, publication of books, essays, and articles related to British politics will skyrocket as writers, politicians, and pundits from the left, right and centre battle it out in the run up to the general election in May of this year. The party conferences have already been in full swing, the whips will be working overtime to pull their party dissenters back into line, backstabbing and tit for tat will be rife across the nation, political leaders once again will debate... [read more]
Hermann Wittenberg ed., JM Coetzee: Two Screenplays
reviewed by Marc Farrant
JM Coetzee’s sole publication of 2014, JM Coetzee: Two Screenplays, comprises two self-authored screenplay adaptations of the early novels In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). The screenplays might be considered audacious formal experiments; new textual ground from one of the key figures of World Literature. However, written respectively in 1981 and 1995, they equally testify to a verbal range and aesthetic dexterity that has been a largely overlooked... [read more]
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto
reviewed by James Everest
It may not have been what they intended, but in The History Manifesto Jo Guldi and David Armitage have, in fact, produced two manifestos. The first of these is a call for historians to play a more active role in contemporary society. The second argues that the proper way of doing this is through narratives of long-term historical change: what they, using a term first popularised by French historian Fernand Braudel in the 1950s, refer to as the ‘return of the longue durée’. The second point... [read more]
Wendy Cope, Life, Love and the Archers: Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose
reviewed by Gee Williams
Wendy Cope published her first collection of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1985. But far from attaching herself to the brand of Amis senior, Cope has become a brand in her own right, strong enough to coax investment from the fiercest Dragons’ Den. I’m one of those delighted to spend my time on her, always sure of a favourable return. And I’m in good company. That first book has sold 180,000 copies, amazing for any poetry book, let alone a first, let alone by a woman, let... [read more]
Antoni Kapcia, Leadership in the Cuban Revolution: The Unseen Story
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Antoni Kapcia’s most recent book on Cuba (he has published several, principally on culture) could hardly have been better timed. Leadership in the Cuban Revolution presents its main argument in an odd cover design in which Fidel Castro’s face is blocked out by a large pink circle. In fact the book appeared just a few months before Raúl, Fidel’s brother and leader of Cuba since Fidel’s retirement in 2006, announced on December 17 a historic agreement with the US to end its 55-year... [read more]
Robert P. Waxler, The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The risk that Robert Waxler refers to in the title of this unapologetically conventional homage to literature is that books might suggest something to their readers about their own lives that the readers didn't already know. Life is a journey, a ceaseless and imperfect and necessarily incomplete quest for self-identity, but novels and stories can provide the guideposts by which we navigate through it, unlike the absorbent screens of the digital age, which are perniciously distracting and... [read more]
To a growing and often fanatical readership, Marilynne Summers Robinson is unrivalled as a writer of American prose. The author first rose to prominence when her second novel, Gilead, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005, and by the time President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010 Robinson was literary fiction’s worst kept secret, wildly popular amongst book groups, journalists, literary critics and, indeed, the President.
'I feel like I know y’all,' Obama... [read more]
Richard Marshall, Philosophy at 3:AM: Questions and Answers with 25 Top Philosophers
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
The day I first looked at 3:AM the latest End Times interview by Richard Marshall shared the website’s homepage with a review of Russell Brand’s Revolution, a juxtaposition worthy of Marshall’s concern: ‘where have all the philosophers gone?’ Marshall describes 3:AM as ‘a self-proclaimed underground mag’, essentially iconoclastic rather than philosophical, often anti-academia, and generally publishing in areas related to fiction and the arts. His series of interviews began as an... [read more]
CLR James, The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, with the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government
reviewed by Christian Høgsbjerg
In his classic cultural history of cricket and civilisation, Beyond a Boundary (1963) the great Trinidadian Marxist CLR James recalled the time when ‘the Trinidad workers in the oilfields moved’ during the mass strike of 1937. ‘They were followed by masses of people in all the other islands, closing one epoch in West Indian history and opening another. One Government commentator, in reviewing the causes, was kind enough to refer to the writings of CLR James as helping to stir up the... [read more]
Peter Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes
reviewed by Dominic Fox
An alternative title for Pete Wolfendale’s Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes might have been A Defence of Philosophy; for what Wolfendale has written, in the form of a polemic against the ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’ of Graham Harman, is a repudiation that unfolds into a systematic explication of Wolfendale’s own philosophical commitments. It is ultimately a defence of philosophical seriousness, of a particular way of holding such commitments and consenting to be... [read more]
