Andy Beckett is writing a book about the radical Labour left since 1968.
For those inclined to ponder the state of the BBC, and of British television in general, the performance of Panorama has long been a favoured indicator. In January 1955, not much more than a year after the current affairs programme began broadcasting, the Sunday Times declared: ‘Panorama is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with television.’ Yet within five years, the Daily...
About a year ago, during one of the peaks of exasperation at the Government in the left-leaning parts of the British press, I interviewed a member of a think tank close to New Labour. For an hour or so he kept up a fairly convincing defence of the Government. He cited the increases under Blair of certain social security benefits, the reductions in taxes for some of the poorest Britons, the...
The first time I went to Chile, while General Pinochet was still under arrest in Britain, it seemed wise while I was in Santiago to read books about him discreetly. Early on the hot, clear summer mornings, I would cross the screeching road outside my hotel, pass through an elaborate wrought-iron gate, and walk up Cerro Santa Lucia, a steep wooded hill in the centre of the capital. At every...
On Tib Street in the centre of Manchester, in the part of the city keen to promote itself as the Northern Quarter, a new delicatessen recently opened. According to its website, Love Saves the Day is ‘an integrated, licensed, food and grocery store for urban living’. It has a mostly glass façade, and two different logos, and packages its goods with almost fetishistic attention. One brand of coffee comes in a metallic silver bag, with the following information printed down one side in varying sizes, colours and typefaces, as carefully laidout as a magazine centrespread: ‘Northern Quarter Blend … Slack, smoky, complex, 24-7, domestic bliss … A cosmopolitan blend of coffees from each of the major growing regions, combining rich Indonesian complexity with sparkling Latin American fizz, and sunny African fruitiness, truly the world in a cup.’‘
The fashion is relatively recent for slicing up history into ten-year periods, each of them crudely flavoured and differently coloured, like a tube of wine gums. Growing up in Britain in the...
For many people including myself, 11 September has long been a date of mourning and rage. On that day in 1973, lethal aircraft flew low over a major city and destroyed a great symbolic building: the Presidential...
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