Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
Show More
Show More
... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
Show More
Show More
... than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... in the Spectator, of which Neil is the chairman: an exercise of Jones’s free speech rights that John Stuart Mill would have recognised as a paradigm.Owen Jones, meanwhile, is subject to an endless stream of vitriol from politicians and journalists, as well as ordinary Twitter users, and was assaulted by a man on the extreme right who recognised him in a ...