Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
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Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
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Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
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Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
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This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
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Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
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Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
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Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
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... the New Brutalists were interested in community life in the East End of London (more through Nigel Henderson’s photographs than Willmott and Young’s sociology), in the messy, chaotic work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Art Brut (‘Fuck Henry Moore’ was one slogan), in vernacular architecture, in industrial buildings, and in Hollywood films and ...

Show Us the Father

James Wood, 13 August 2026

... sister) inherited from our mother. He was prodigious. At his ninth birthday party, he calmly told Nigel Corner, the richest boy at school and son of the owner of North East Steel Seating, who’d been boasting about having an indoor swimming pool installed at his house, ‘Nigel, we don’t all possess your amenities.’ At ...

Hated and Loved in a Breath

Jenny Turner: On Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 23 July 2026

History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon 
by William K. Malcolm.
Jetstone, 580 pp., £24.99, February 2025, 978 1 910858 36 3
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... the North Sea, has neither the geographic nor historical glamour of the mountains to its north and west, but it was, until his own time, the seat of what Gibbon, a communist sympathiser, called ‘a dual power’: good soil, ‘under the sleet, churned and pelted’, and the tenant farmer precariat, who were unprotected, even, by the Crofters Holdings Act of ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... his photo uploaded and his background details included, his ‘education’, his football team (West Ham), and the fact that he now worked as a driver for a firm called Executive Cars. It was at this point that Ronnie’s ‘character’ began to veer off on its own, as characters do when you’re creating them in fiction. Ronnie, it turned out, was quite ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
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Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
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British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
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An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
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... a sun-bleached cloth poppy fastened to the back rest. It’s a memorial to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died ...

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

... where he was reunited with his mother. The following day, a Sunderland Echo reporter called Nigel Green drove Heron from the monastery to Morpeth railway station. ‘He was terrified of being recognised,’ Green told me. ‘I bought him a baseball cap and put him on a train to Scotland.’ Green took a photograph before he left: there are blurred ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... to benefit.It was not long before any such linear prospect was in trouble. At the Treasury, Nigel Lawson had pressed for British entry into the Community’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1985, and when Thatcher vetoed this, shadowed it nonetheless. By 1989 the economy – pumped up by Lawson to secure Thatcher’s third electoral victory in 1987 ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... warning to immigrants in a place, once Labour through and through, that has fallen hard for Nigel Farage. Blyth was for generations a skilled labourers’ town, a place of shipbuilding, coal shipping and coal mining. But these old industries have vanished as completely as if they were never there, and most of the people who worked in them are ...