The Pessimist’s Optimist

Kevin Okoth: Beyond the Postcolony, 10 July 2025

Brutalism 
by Achille Mbembe, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Duke, 181 pp., £19.99, January 2024, 978 1 4780 2558 0
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... repression of opposition activists. (He plays up his past as a guerrilla fighter in the Ugandan Bush War to bolster his masculinist image.) Since the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, Ugandan public discourse has been rife with graphic descriptions of queer sex. Nyanzi’s vulgar (and very funny) interventions on social media ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... a participant recorded, they sat with ‘red ears’ as a leading authority of the WGE, Hans Peter Ipsen, instructed them on the supremacy of European law over the national law of any member state. Ipsen’s opinion would prevail: five days later Lecourt issued the ECJ’s ruling on Costa v. Enel to the same effect. The cornerstone of European justice ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... keen to maximise profit. In August 2016, there was another fire at a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush. The London Fire Brigade wrote to every borough council in May 2017 and told them they needed to re-risk-assess their buildings in the light of the fire, but few of them did in the month that remained before Grenfell. Over the last twenty years pressure ...