The political profile is a paradoxical thing, and that is part of its fascination. Power is rarely introspective: at its height it is usually unable to reflect or describe itself, and even at rest the last person you would ask for insight into the politician is the politician. But there comes a phase in political […]
Money Changes Everything. How Finance Made Civilization Possible. William N. Goetzmann. Princeton University Press, RPR £24.95 William Goetzmann in his new book takes readers on a whirlwind tour of financial history starting in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and leading up to an outlook what a roadmap into the future might look like. A professor at the […]
Radiohead’s new album A Moon Shaped Pool is the best work the band has produced since they began working over twenty years ago. It’s also their most artistically consistent creation. The album begins with Burn The Witch, pre-released as a music video. It exerts a visceral demand on our attention. Using the imagery of 1960s children’s television […]
What goes on when the movie is over and the lights come up? How does the film come to be projected onto the silver screen in the first place? Step into The Flick, a run-down movie theatre in Massachusetts, and see life through the eyes of the three disaffected employees who lurk in the shadows […]
Ben Wheatley and his wife Amy Jump have adapted J.G.Ballard’s prophesy of affluenza and anger into film, seven years after Ballard’s death. The maverick British film director and script writer have incorporated the ridiculous cars, lapels and shagpile sideburns of the 70s in the re-working of his dystopian futuristic social commentary, High Rise. Tom Hiddleston, one […]
In Andrey Tarkovsky’s only written work, the visionary Russian director recounts the letters he received from the public in response to his semi-autobiographical film Mirror. The content of the letters is varied and yet one theme recurs over and over again: “Everything that torments me, everything I have and that I long for, that makes me […]
London. Its epithets trip automatically, almost thoughtlessly, off the tongue: financial centre, world city. Go back a few centuries and you find them still: birthplace of modern parliamentary democracy, the city that ended the slave trade. Rich with history, re-imagined countless times in literature, London has squatted in the global consciousness for half a thousand […]
In the days around the release of David Bowie’s final album, several leading writers on music republished earlier interviews with the great man. We know now why there were no fresh interviews to accompany his new work. Bowie the showman had even orchestrated his departure from the stage, and the new album with its fixation […]
This year will be dominated by debates about the relationship between Islam and the West. It has never been more important to read Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Soumission. The novel was set to be published in France on 7th January 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, on which Bernard Maris was murdered. He was a columnist for […]
1. American Sniper One of the greatest war films since Saving Private Ryan, director Clint Eastwood’s visceral retelling of the life of sniper Chris Kyle was a huge hit in the United States, pulling in $350 million at the box office. Unashamedly patriotic, with a superb performance by Bradley Cooper, American Sniper is a powerful […]
The astonishing global success of Star Wars is a partly inexplicable phenomenon. Why is this sometimes entertaining but always derivative space opera the most valuable piece of intellectual property the world has ever seen? That mystery is now part of its success. Decade in and decade out audiences queue and queue again, as if to […]
The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny. Stephen Green, Haus Publishing, RRP £7.99 Stripped of its history, culture and achievements, how would Europe be viewed by the world? Had an Indian invented the steam engine or a Chinese sailor discovered the Americas, and therefore radically changed the course of economic history, how […]
Winston Churchill Reporting. Simon Read, Da Capo Press, RPR £17.99 ‘You could not stand for five minutes under a shed with that man while it rained but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever seen.’ That was Johnson on Burke; it also applies to Churchill. Anyone with a […]
Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone. Andrew Hosken, Arcadia Books, RPR £15.99 Jeremy Corbyn only appears once in the pages of ‘Ken’, and it is a bizarre cameo indeed. In 1994, Ken Livingstone announced that he was running against Tony Blair for Labour leader, with Corbyn as his deputy. The only problem was that […]
Why Should Anyone Work Here? Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Harvard Business Review Press, RRP £20 One of the most influential business books of the 20th century was William Whyte’s The Organisation Man. A sociologist, Whyte would go into the vast sprawling megacorps that characterised post-war American capitalism and peer into the souls of its foot soldiers. What […]
Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 12 October 2015 – 24 January 2016 Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how impressive the Ancient Egyptians really were. The sheer scale of their achievements is mind-boggling, from the architectural wonder of the pyramids, to the intricacy of the afterlife customs which terrifies […]
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