Andy Beckett

In August​ 2007, two months into Gordon Brown’s premiership, two-thirds of voters approved of his performance: one of the highest rates of satisfaction for any prime minister over the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and...

Whenever Britain​ is about to bomb another country, or is openly considering it, an old video will start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons in 1998, back in the distant days of New Labour, of which he was a frequent critic. Tony Blair’s government was seeking parliamentary approval to...

Close to the end​ of Bruce Chatwin’s celebrated, cryptic, not completely reliable book In Patagonia, published in 1977, there is a short passage about a resident of what was then the remotest city in Chile, near South America’s cold and windy tip. In a book made up of terse, sometimes haunted fragments, this passage is the most unsettling by some distance. ‘There is a man...

On​ 30 September 2001, Tariq Ali was arrested at Munich airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel...