United Kingdom
Editor at Verso Books, writer on culture/class/crises/books for TLS, New Statesman, Tribune, Jacobin, New Left Review, Boston Review and others.
Commission me: [email protected]
Pestilence and plague have often prompted waves of apocalyptic thinking, calling into question the steady march of progress in human history.
At some point at the end of last year I became overwhelmed by the feeling that my life had reached an impasse. Personal crises and a seemingly stalled career had left me feeling precarious, unmoored from my immediate social surroundings; the life I had tried so hard to construct for myself seems to be slowly crumbling around me.
Review of Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (OR Books, 2020). Mike Davis has good claim to being the most important Marxist historian of the past fifty years.
How to avoid repeating the mistakes of deindustrialisation At the start of June 2020, Bentley Motors announced that it was to cut 1,000 jobs at its Crewe plant in Cheshire, UK.1 The company, a manufacturer of luxury cars, which has been based in the town since the 1940s, said that while the current crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic wasn't the direct cause of the job losses, it was a "hastener".
The Rise and Fall of the British Nation aims to dispel the myths which, David Edgerton claims, envelop his subject, chief among them the notion that Britain's relative decline after 1945 had its roots in the anti-industrial culture of a gentleman-amateur governing elite. Today, a much diminished Ukania cannot possibly go it alone, Edgerton insists.
During a recent episode of the BBC's Politics Live, pollster Deborah Mattinson of Britain Thinks recited a tired stereotype of the working class and its relation to the Labour Party. Paraphrasing a response during a focus group session in Crewe in 2018, she claimed that working-class voters perceived that Labour had gone from a "pie-and-a-pint party to quinoa".
I must have been nine or ten when it happened. It was getting dark, the low light fading across the fields, barely enough to illuminate the playground. My memory now is fuzzy, I haven't been back to the area for nearly two decades, and the vast expanse of grass surrounding me must be a childish exaggeration.
The Covid-19 pandemic has had disastrous consequences across the economy, and with the IMF predicting a 3% contraction of the economy this year, that will only get worse. While this will hit many industries hard, there is a particularly deep fear for those in the relatively privileged cultural industries.
What happened on Thursday is monumental, and Labour's defeat seems all the more painful because of the collapse of its traditional of the vote heartlands in the North and Midlands. Durham North West, held by Labour since it was recreated as a constituency in 1950 and last represented by Laura Pidcock, had a Labour majority of nearly 9,000 wiped out.
A Radical Romance is an inspiring account of the deep love between Alison Light and her late husband Raphael Samuel, the historian and founder of the