James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.
Bulbs wait for the right conditions – sufficient light, water, warmth – to produce new growth. Eighteen months ago, when I moved to a new boat, the conditions were right for me, too. For the first time after more than ten years living in London I had some outdoor space. I lugged pots, troughs and bags of compost and, by the end of the summer, had planted a little patch around...
Early results matter in politics. The news on the morning of 6 May seemed to confirm a familiar story. Labour had taken two totemic Tory councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, piling on metropolitan voters but failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before...
Max Webster’s production of Henry V at the Donmar Warehouse promised to examine a riven England and the alternating cast of cynics and inadequates who govern it. The interpretation is still apt, though the genuflections to colonialism and climate change seem like the perfunctory box-ticking of liberal orthodoxy. Other interpretations are now more pressing, and more awkward. This is a war play, the story of an overweening king set on reconquest, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Or is it? Isn’t it also the story of a master rhetorician, a reformed actor-king uniting a fractious nation?
Marthe Brossier, a provincial demoniac, had caused a stir in Orléans and Cléry before being brought to Paris in 1599. Her sponsors, probably members of the zealous Capuchin order, timed her arrival for just before Easter, when Lenten devotions among the Catholic faithful were nearing their climax. Furious at Henri IV’s edict of toleration for his Protestant subjects, the...
Humanity has proved itself powerful enough to change the climate at a planetary level, to spark off chains of extinctions and permeate wildernesses with microplastics. But this was inadvertent, even if the destruction has been prolonged by its beneficiaries. Whether human beings have the collective capacity intentionally to reverse this planetary effect isn’t clear. The question of agency has a bearing on a number of other issues: whether technology can save us; whether a climate-adapted future looks like Western consumer capitalism with a transformed energy base and less waste, or whether such a transition will necessitate a break with the proliferation of luxury commodities and the underlying obsession with acceleration and expansion; even the precise alloy of determination, optimism and melancholia with which one approaches climate politics. Andreas Malm is less uncertain: ‘The grotesque concentration of resources for burning at the top of the human pyramid is a scourge for all living beings; an effective climate policy would be the total expropriation of the top 1 to 10 per cent.’
In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising...
James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talk to Tom about Britain's new monarch and Prime Minister.
James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change.
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