Daniel Soar

People think they like reading Jonathan Coe’s novels for any number of reasons. For their satirical sharpness, for instance: What a Carve Up! (1994) – the carve-up in question involving agriculture, politics and the media – seemed to express exactly what people felt about greed, corruption and class entitlement in the 1980s. Historians of their own lifetimes admired the...

The best scene in the new Bourne movie – a chase and a killing at Waterloo Station, with jolting cameras and real-life commuters – comes about because a journalist has failed to see how far the tentacles of American spies can reach. The journalist – we know he’s a fool because he wears a man-bag and writes for the Guardian – has just got back from interviewing a...

During the row over weaponry that thundered on during the G8 summit at Heiligendamm – drowning out the distant shouts of protesters and the platitudinous murmuring of soon-to-be-ex-world leaders about the need (again) to tackle climate change – Russia’s president took a leaf out of his own book. The book is called Judo: History, Theory, Practice, and Vladimir Putin wrote it...

Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an isolation chamber, where he squats on a bench for a week over ‘knee-deep bilge’. A blind-drunk guard, a woman-beater, spends the night outside at forty degrees below – and wakes up, frost-mangled, without any hands. The inmates hack one another apart with machine-tools. There are ‘vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chisellings’.

In April this year, a number of articles were written and speeches made bemoaning the continuing rapid decline in Labour Party membership, and in membership of political parties generally. The crisis meant an alarming shortage of people to stuff propaganda into envelopes and have doors slammed in their faces at election time. The membership figure quoted by Labour headquarters in April...