Poems from Mathew Knights and Dr David McKinstry. Based in Arbroath, Matthew Knights is a writer and creative writing tutor (www.matthewknights.co.uk) and Artistic Director at the Knights Theatre Company (www.knightstheatre.co.uk) Jennie Lee Straight-faced woman With a magnificent heart The type to bear arms In other ages and places In this Where she found herself instead […]
Jonas Poher Rasmussen, director, Flee (2021) Reviewed by Jackie Bergson True stories which are told in first person throughout a feature length film are unusual. Flee is just such an unusual film. Formed as a virtual documentary, this story is brought to life through mixed media animation, archive footage and original sound recordings. The interrogator […]
Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, The World For Sale: Money, Power And The Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources, Random House, 2021, £9.99, pp416, 9781847942678 Reviewed by Will Podmore. Blas and Farchy are journalists at Bloomberg News. Previously, they covered commodities for the Financial Times. They have produced a fascinating account, based on more than […]
Mike Phipps, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, OR Books, 2022, 9781682193693, £13, pp230 Reviewed by Dexter Govan. When the storm cleared after the 2019 general election, there was wreckage in its wake. Much of it now is the flotsam accounts of prominent individuals from the labour left, published as monographs, and often accusing former crewmates […]
Arnold Weinstein. The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing, Princeton University Press, £14, 9780691177304, pp352 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan. The Lives of Literature, a valediction by a retiring academic who taught at an Ivy League university for over fifty years,has a lot not going for it. Prone to platitudinizing, paternalistic at times and peppered with […]
Patrick O’Hare Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons, Pluto Press, 2022, 9780745341408, pp240, £19.99 Reviewed by John Wood. Whether from an environmental or geopolitical perspectives, waste management is on the political agenda in 2022. O’Hare – a young and influential activist academic – takes the reader on an impressive journey […]
Gregor Gall (ed.) A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society, Pluto, £14.99, 9780745345062, pp352 Reviewed by Matthew Crighton. I both applaud and am deeply disappointed by this book. As a collection of pieces on the main issues regarding inequalities in Scotland, it has clear analysis and prescriptions from a constellation of excellent […]
When issued with a fixed penalty by the Metropolitan Police for breaking Covid rules, Boris Johnson said he was not going to resign and that it was important to move on and do the job the British people wanted him to do – which was tackling the cost-of-living crisis, which he started in the first […]
For the left, the ‘test of war’ is said to be the ultimate test of their politics. This phraseology follows the collapse of socialist internationalism at the beginning of the First World War in 1914 when nearly all socialist parties in the countries of Europe dropped their commitment to defend the interests of their fellow […]
As the Calmac crisis continues to push the SNP Scottish Government further towards the rocks, Gregor Gall introduces a major new book on facilitating a future society in Scotland from the Jimmy Reid Foundation. We are now one year into Nicola Sturgeon’s third SNP Scottish Government. Barely a week goes by without a new, regressive […]