Lisa Appignanesi, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness
reviewed by Polly Bull
In 1871, Christiana Edmunds laced chocolate creams with strychnine and distributed them throughout her hometown of Brighton, hoping to poison her lover’s wife without attracting suspicion. When a young boy died from eating the chocolates, they were traced back to Edmunds and she was charged with his murder.
Edmunds pleaded not guilty, with a defence of insanity. Acquittal on this basis largely rested on proof of her inability, at the time of the crime, to distinguish right from wrong. In... [read more]
Patrick Cockburn, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising
reviewed by Daniel Whittall
‘The deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria may now have gone too far to re-create genuinely unitary states.’ So writes Patrick Cockburn towards the end of The Jihadis Return, a remarkably timely intervention that explores the recent history and present dynamics of what Cockburn terms ‘al’Qa’ida type movements’, foremost amongst which is the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). It is a gloomy prognosis, one which represents the final nail in the already-rotten coffin of... [read more]
Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects is overflowing with words that splice subjects together in numerous, thrilling combinations. At times a nightmare to read (when one wishes to sense something beyond their running form), Brinkema’s use of language otherwise brilliantly materialises the book’s central thesis. And as we shall see, it is important that the readerly movement from pleasuring discomfort, to Angst, to joyful understanding is captured; that it is there, in the form of... [read more]
Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century
reviewed by Jennifer Upton
Carolyn Steedman has dedicated her academic life to exploring how lives from the past can confound our expectations about history, the way it is written, and the meaning of its silences. Her first book, The Tidy House (Virago, 1982), was about a short story written by three working-class schoolgirls in a primary school where Steedman was a teacher before entering university employment. These girls, though writing a fictional story, were also in an important way writing about their lives, and... [read more]
David Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now
reviewed by Abigail Rhodes
The Bible tells us that ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.’ (Matthew 6:24) Mammon is personified in the New Testament as a demon and sometimes included as one of the seven Princes of Hell (Mammon is to greed what Lucifer is to pride). Over the centuries his name has gained currency as a pejorative term to describe unjust worldly gain and is... [read more]
Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography
reviewed by David Renton
If one were to write a total history of racism and anti-racism in Britain since 1945 — taking in the arrival of the Empire Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill riots, the deaths of Blair Peach, Cynthia Jarrett and Stephen Lawrence, the stunts of Martin Webster and the brief electoral success of Nick Griffin, shifting popular ideas of solidarity or exclusion, and the changing approaches of the British state — Darcus Howe would deserve inclusion at three points.
First, in 1970-71 as a defender... [read more]
Oasis were central to the Nineties not just as one of its most popular groups, among the top two or three immediately cited when the word Britpop is invoked, but also to the decade as experienced in the UK. They feel like a group whose success was willed into being by a generation of mainstream music lovers who, post-rave, had fallen in love with communalism again. The diversity and fragmentation that punk and post-punk had engendered during the 1980s and beyond left people feeling confused,... [read more]
‘You pay the money to allow someone else to make the choice, you are consumed, you are the product of television. Television delivers people’ - Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Shoolman, ‘Television Delivers People’, 1973
Emerging from the very particular set of social and political circumstances of 1960s America, the trajectory of the medium of video, traced by Chris Meigh-Andrews in his second edition of A History of Video Art, draws upon a multiplicity of events in the history of... [read more]
Micah Uetricht, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity
reviewed by Jake Kinzey
Two separate areas sit side by side, separated by City Line Avenue. North of City Line is Lower Merion Township. It is part of the ‘Main Line’, one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Overbrook lies south. Some of the neighbourhood lives in relative affluence, but the rest are like many other Philadelphians, and live in a world of poverty and violence.
One of the major differences between the two neighbourhoods is the state of their public high schools. In 2010, Lower Merion High... [read more]
Danny Dorling, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster
reviewed by Joseph Finlay
Listen to any debate about our housing crisis and within seconds you’ll hear someone proclaim that ‘we need to build more houses’. All political parties accept this as holy writ, vying with each other in their pledges to build the most homes. In All That Is Solid, Danny Dorling makes a powerful case against this assumption. There are 66 million bedrooms in England and Wales, for 55 million people. Many of these people, being married or cohabiting couples, share a room. Even in densely... [read more]
