The Righteous Community

Jackson Lears: Legacies of the War on Terror, 24 July 2025

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life 
by Richard Beck.
Verso, 556 pp., £30, March, 978 1 83674 072 8
Show More
Show More
... Soldiers ‘made out of suspected terrorists a new kind of Indian’, Beck says, ‘a people born and raised so far from the heart of real civilisation that violence and humiliation were the only languages they could be expected to understand’. But what happened after 9/11 was something new: the legitimation of torture at the highest levels of ...

My Mother’s Prison

Daniella Shreir: Chantal Akerman’s Predicament, 19 March 2026

Oeuvre écrite et parlée, 1968-2015 
by Chantal Akerman, edited by Cyril Béghin.
L’Arachnéen, 1584 pp., £60, April 2024, 978 2 37367 022 6
Show More
Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 1, 1967-78 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, February 2025Show More
Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 2, 1982-2015 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, June 2025Show More
Show More
... have been repeated too often.Akerman was the daughter​ of immigrants. Her father, Jacob, was born in the Jewish district of Kraków in 1919. The family left for Danzig in 1923, where they remained for a year. The restoration of Polish sovereignty after the First World War had led to pogroms and they considered moving to Palestine, but at the port in ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I think.– Which is a very Scottish thing to be doing.Building sewers?No, being an engineer.In King’s Lynn where he had his job? This was ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

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

... against its return?About forty thousand​ people live in Blyth, 97 per cent of them British-born. It’s a town of small red brick terraces and newer red brick estates, a modest, low-rise, neat and tidy sort of place. When I arrived at the Campbells’, I saw a neighbour down on his knees on his immaculate driveway, rustproofing a drain cover. Deirdre ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love ...