Crime was a topic which Thatcher often referred to, especially during the 1979 general election campaign when she frequently talked about people wanting to feel safe walking the streets. She also favoured the use of corporal punishment and voted to bring back hanging whenever there was a vote on the topic in the Houses of Parliament. But in practice, her governments were not known for being especially ‘tough’ on crime. The memoirs of successive Home Secretaries in the 1980s reveal that Thatcher was content to leave them to run the Home Office and to bring forth whichever sorts of acts they wished to – despite the fact that crime rose during the 1980s in a dramatic fashion. [read full essay]
At the heart of the Booker Prize, there lies a contradiction. The Prize is, with very few exceptions, awarded, and intended to be awarded, to a novel which undersigns the premises of a humanism by which we are all unique individuals possessed not only of depth but of multiple dimensionalities. Its recipients should give an image of the individual, bearing the full weight of its Shakespearean contrariness, in time. Yet the victors, along with most shortlisted works, are also commended on the grounds of the recognisability of the personal worlds they portray: it is not just that these fictions communicate unique experience, they make of a unique experience a generalisation about the human condition whose truth is commonly attestable. [read full essay]
A new exhibition at the Barbican explores the relationship between photography and architecture in the epoch of modernity. It is testament to the enduring power of the city in the artistic imagination, exposing the aching desolation of the urban landscape, inhuman and austere – but also, conversely, its site as a crucible of resistance. [read full essay]
Sophie Collins, along with Rachael Allen, is co-founder and editor of tender, ‘an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists,’ which, since its appearance last year, has published work by Emily Berry, Carina Finn, Lavinia Greenlaw and Emily Toder, among others. She is currently carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast, and her poems, translations and other writings have been published in Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The White Review and elsewhere. [read full interview]
The potential for humans to take to the skies, before it became a stable and accepted means of travel, had connotations of blasphemy. There are reasons the sky is above: it is a reminder to humans that they should keep their humility tethered close by, if nothing else than to retain their place as man in God’s Kingdom. Lest we forget that God, in Genesis, after all, gave Man dominion over the earth and all its multitudes (not the heavens) and in any case, Daedalus’ loss… a punishment that could be wished upon no-one. [read full essay]
'Virginia Woolf: Life, Art, Vision' at the National Portrait Gallery is a assemblage of portraits, each one a moment captured, defined; but together, they form a diverse arena of images, collectively communicating the partiality of any single attempt to represent their subject. The exhibition as a whole forms a portrait, but an anti-authoritative one, built out of fragments and glimpses which represent their subject as multiple, fractured, mutable. [read full essay]
Scotland is not going to be an independent nation; neither, in its economics or its society is it very different from the rest of Britain, and the depressing thought is that those of us who live far from Scotland are going to face the same problems – in 2015, and repeatedly, until the majority of people who lack a financial reason to identify with the status quo have enough confidence in their own shared ability to replace it that the begin to see themselves as a class, that is, an alternative set of rulers in waiting. [read full essay]
David Harvey’s work on political economy, urbanism and the legacy and ongoing theoretical interpretation of Karl Marx has been at the forefront of critical debate across the humanities and social sciences since the 1970s. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, recently published by Profile Books, the pre-eminent economist and thinker provides an incisive guide to the world around us, and a manifesto for change. In this interview, Harvey discusses the significance and centrality of the theory of political economy to understanding the post-2008 landscape; he also considers the transformation of the meaning of labour, digital technologies, rentier capitalism and emergent spaces of hope and promise. [read full interview]
As our relationship with the internet and the enormous amounts of information we read on it changes, so do our publishing strategies. There is a lot at stake in conversations about economies of attention online. The future of the online essay — maybe the future of the essay — depends on the publishing platforms we come up with. It would be too easy, too optimistic, too complacent to say that the internet liberates us from the mundane considerations of print, especially when thinking about the increasingly corporate structure of the web. [read full essay]
In her exciting debut novel, The Last Kings of Sark, Rosa Rankin-Gee successfully evokes the image of life on a small island as a constant negotiation with the past. The narrator, Jude, wants her summer narrative to begin with leaves, light and sun-kissed beaches; instead, it opens in the cockpit of a private plane hired by her father, merchant banker Eddy Defoe, to supply his family with frozen meat and expensive French mineral water. The novel follows the characters through a tense summer on the titular channel island, and into their later lives of labour and love in France. [read full interview]
