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William Davies: Politics on Speed, 7 May 2026

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation without Political Consequences 
by Anton Jäger.
Verso, 108 pp., £11.99, February, 978 1 83674 207 4Show More
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“... parties’ led by ‘hyper-leaders’, which gain popularity by surfing waves of mass alienation. Nigel Farage’s succession of political pop-ups and rebrands – Ukip, Leave.EU, the Brexit Party, Reform – is a signal example.What Jäger seeks to understand in Hyperpolitics is the way politics appears to have returned with a vengeance, yet at the same time ...”

‘I will embarrass you now by saying that I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer’

Paul Foot, 17 October 1996

Sleaze: Politicians, Private Interests and Public Reaction 
edited by F.F. Ridley and Alan Doig.
Oxford, 222 pp., £10.99, April 1996, 0 19 922273 8Show More
Changing Trains: The Autobiography of Steven Norris 
Hutchinson, 273 pp., £16.99, October 1996, 0 09 180212 1Show More
The Quango Debate 
edited by F.F. Ridley and David Wilson.
Oxford, 188 pp., £10.99, September 1995, 9780199222384Show More
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“... an equivalent rise, bringing him to £ 1.3m a year. Kingfisher’s committee was chaired by Sir Nigel Mobbs of Slough Estates, whose own remuneration committee decided that, after a bad year, Sir Nigel was the only executive who deserved a rise at all – his pay went up to £312,000. Slough Estates’ remuneration ...”

People Like You

David Edgar: In Burnley, 23 September 2021

On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town 
by Mike Makin-Waite.
Lawrence and Wishart, 274 pp., £17, May, 978 1 913546 02 1Show More
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“... the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their parents to hand themselves in at the police station. Copycat rioters from ...”

Right-ons

Jenny Turner, 24 October 1991

Gaudi Afternoon 
by Barbara Wilson.
Virago, 172 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 264 1Show More
The players come again 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 229 pp., £12.99, August 1991, 1 85381 306 0Show More
Poetic Justice 
by Amanda Cross.
Virago, 176 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 1 85381 025 8Show More
Birth Marks 
by Sarah Dunant.
Joseph, 230 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 7181 3511 3Show More
Burn Marks 
by Sara Paretsky.
Virago, 340 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 9781853812798Show More
Deep Sleep 
by Frances Fyfield.
Heinemann, 198 pp., £13.99, September 1991, 0 434 27426 7Show More
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“... Murder in the Collective (1985, and probably the novel that established the genre as a whole), Nigel Fountain’s Days like these (1985, from the now-defunct Pluto crime list) and Sara Schulman’s marvellous The Sophie Horowitz Story (published in 1984 by a small lesbian press in the US, and now published here by Sheba Feminist Publishing) still make ...”

Short Cuts

James Butler: Labour’s Failure, 21 May 2026

“... party loyalty is dead and ‘heartlands’ are a thing of the past. The results in the North-West were grimmer than Labour had hoped. It has been saved from catastrophe in a number of councils – Wigan, Salford, Halton – by the fact that only a third of the seats were up for election. One consequence may be the chilling of Andy Burnham’s leadership ...”

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0Show More
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“... exceeding its outlay on the Falklands War. After the strike ended, the Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, described it as ‘a very good investment’.The miners returned to work in March 1985; a thousand had been sacked during the strike, often after being arrested on picket lines. The fate of these men anticipated that of their workmates. Although the ...”

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6Show More
Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1Show More
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“... compensation and reparation for victims of historical injustice have entered into law. In 1964 West Germany gave the British government £1 million to distribute to British victims of the Nazi regime. Holocaust survivors are still entitled to compensation from the German government, under an agreement reached in 2015. Reparations for victims of slavery and ...”

On Thatcher

“... madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992The picture​ which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were translated into policy via will, whim and pique. The advice of responsible ministers was superseded ...”

Blood Boiling

Paul Foot: Corporate takeover, 22 February 2001

Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain 
by George Monbiot.
Macmillan, 430 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 333 90164 9Show More
No Logo 
by Naomi Klein.
Flamingo, 501 pp., £8.99, January 2001, 0 00 653040 0Show More
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“... each of them in their days as radical reformers: Brian Wilson, once abrasive editor of the West Highland Free Press and socialist champion of the Scottish Highlands, now defending the Government’s policies on the bridge to Skye; Nick Raynsford, whom I recall coming to see me at the Daily Mirror to seek more publicity for the single homeless people in ...”

Trained to silence

John Mepham, 20 November 1980

The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935 
edited by Nigel Nicolson.
Hogarth, 476 pp., £12.50, September 1979, 0 7012 0469 9Show More
Leave the Letters till we’re dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-41 
edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman.
Hogarth, 556 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 7012 0470 2Show More
The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III: 1925-1930 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell.
Hogarth, 384 pp., £10.50, March 1980, 0 7012 0466 4Show More
Virginia Woolf 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Routledge, 270 pp., £7.95, September 1979, 0 7100 0189 4Show More
Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon 
by Maria DiBattista.
Yale, 252 pp., £11, April 1980, 0 300 02402 9Show More
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“... parts. They are revealing in that they tell us which parts she chose to play. With Vita Sackville-West she played a rather childish game, simulating intimacy by adopting animal personae. ‘Well, my faithless sheep dog’ and ‘Yes, my clever colly,’ she wrote. She had earlier enjoyed playing the lover with Vita, and had come as close with her as with ...”

United Europe?

Jan-Werner Müller, 3 November 2022

“... of realpolitik. For years, pundits and politicians have been fixated on a wave – or as Nigel Farage once put it, a ‘tsunami’ – of populism. But there was nothing inevitable about this. While election results for far-right populist parties have improved over the last two decades, only in Italy have these parties come to power without the ...”

A Very Smart Bedint

Frank Kermode: Harold Nicolson, 17 March 2005

Harold Nicolson 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 383 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 224 06218 2Show More
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“... superiors thought the book cheeky. Of course Some People was published many years before Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage (1973), which, with all the attendant volumes of correspondence and diaries, made Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West more famous for their unusual private lives than for their ...”

Passing-Out Time

Christopher Tayler: Patrick Hamilton’s drinking, 29 January 2009

The Slaves of Solitude 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Constable, 327 pp., £7.99, September 2008, 978 1 84529 415 1Show More
The Gorse Trilogy 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Black Spring, 603 pp., £9.95, June 2007, 978 0 948238 34 5Show More
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“... and Nietzsche during the 1920s, he was suspicious of highbrows: he had more connections in the West End than in universities or journalism and little feeling for most writing done after about 1918. Eliot, Huxley, Lawrence and Joyce were too ‘painfully subjective’, he wrote in 1939, giving their work ‘the character of meaningless ...”

Diary

David Runciman: The Problem with English Football, 23 October 2008

“... Like all smaller clubs they had to sell on many of their best players (including the outstanding Nigel Winterburn to Arsenal), but eccentricity or notoriety meant that others remained with the side long after they became the focus of attention. One was John Fashanu, an astonishingly crude player and an extremely articulate man, who went on to achieve further ...”

Diary

Sheila Fitzpatrick: File-Selves, 22 September 2022

“... me, the Australian Sheila Fitzpatrick. In the spirit of a much discussed British novel of the era, Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity, I felt I had collaborated in an identity theft on myself.Even so, the Bruce passport served me well, in that a year or so later it prevented the KGB realising that the female Sh. Bryus who was studying in Moscow on the British ...”
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