I penned this on the day Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader. In keeping with so many former Labour luminaries, this was a result campaigned against by Alan Johnson. Despite their political differences, Johnson and Corbyn share similar histories. Born within a year of each other, neither went to university. Both were schooled in politics Read More
“A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves” is the first line in Caitlin Doughty’s memoir. It evokes interest and revulsion in exactly the way the author intended, and it’s a theme that is carried throughout. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is an aptly titled creation by a writer who describes herself in the Read More
There is something deeply wrong with this book. The problem is not the subject matter. The Internet Is Not the Answer is an attack on the way a crude ideology of “winner-takes-all” capitalism is shaping the Internet today through companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, and, more revealingly, through newer companies like Instagram, Uber Read More
Cooperation and selfless behaviour appear to be obvious and necessary characteristics of the human condition, but are they merely enlightened self-interest in disguise? David Sloan Wilson’s new book, Does Altruism Exist?, is a vehicle which promotes his views on the evolution of selflessness, especially, but not exclusively, within human communities. It is a topic of Read More
Robert Crawford’s biography is probably the best account so far of how The Waste Land came to be written, and what resources it drew upon. This is not to treat the poem teleologically, as though Eliot had always been working towards it. Rather, the biography simply acknowledges (not least by its subtitle) that Eliot would Read More
It is not easy to reconcile the Scotland that reluctantly became England’s “poor partner” in 1707 with the “Enlightened”, intellectually progressive country of 108 years later. By the close of the first century of parliamentary union, the once “backward” northern state had become renowned for innovations in economics, literature, philosophy, and architecture. In tracing this Read More
Daunderlust – meaning the compulsion to meander – is a term as applicable to the scope of Peter Ross’s latest essay collection as its content, collated as it is from four years of Scotland on Sunday columns. With a remit to report from within where most have never dared nor thought to enter, the peripatetic Read More
“It was wonderful or awful, comic or absurd, poetic or grotesque- to lose one family, then find you had another-but no one seemed able to say which, least of all me.” For those looking for a light summer-read to breeze through on their holiday, Will Boast’s Epilogue might not be the best choice. Telling the Read More
All art is political: Writings on performative art is a collection of interviews and essays on artists whose art lies less in the artwork itself and more in the context in which these artworks are placed. The first interview, with Keith Rowe and Mayo Thompson, suffers from the fact that two artists are interviewed. As Read More
A little passage in Albert Camus’ The Plague has always haunted me. It concerns the difficulty of conveying grief in the very personal way that loss is felt and mourned. In these circumstances, words fall short so that “the current coin of language”, the “commonplaces” and “set phrases of ordinary conversation” must suffice, and failing Read More