Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
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“... have, that unions should be subservient organisations: ‘Their prime role,’ he lectured Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, in 1983, ‘should be to help improve the performance of their firms which provided their members with jobs.’ Yet Tebbit, like Thatcher, let increasing joblessness and other changes in the British economic and political ...”

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

“... The Government went to court and asked for injunctions. The judge chosen to try the case, Murray Gurfein, had been a military intelligence officer during the war – a fact that did not encourage the Times’s lawyers. He began with expressions of concern for the national security. But when he asked the official witnesses to point to particular ...”

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
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“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”

Is it OK to have a child?

Meehan Crist, 5 March 2020

“... share a core value of radical care for the natural world. As the anarchist and social theorist Murray Bookchin pointed out in the mid-1990s, ‘it would be foolhardy to ignore the tendency of antihumanism (particularly trends like sociobiology, Malthusianism and deep ecology) to feed into the politically charged social Darwinism that is very much abroad ...”

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

“... as all his brothers. At first, Abe, the eldest, decided to be a dentist and changed his surname to Murray so that he wouldn’t appear to be a Jewish dentist, but he found he was too squeamish about working inside people’s mouths and went the same way as his brothers. All seven of them must have inferred from their father’s career that it didn’t pay to ...”