This Concerns Everyone

James Butler: Crisis in Care, 2 March 2023

Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care 
by Madeleine Bunting.
Granta, 325 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 1 78278 381 7
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The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? 
by Emma Dowling.
Verso, 248 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 1 78663 035 3
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Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet 
by Nancy Fraser.
Verso, 190 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 83976 123 2
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... what is distinctive about care work in a cloud of sentiment. The novelist and former care worker Andrew Key confesses to irritation whenever he reads ‘about an exhibition by some cool young artist or a new book by a full professor of sociology, or whatever, which takes “care” as its subject’. His essay ‘Late ...

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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... to involve the Soviets in Katanga. Gizenga, too, was dismissed. When Lumumba was later arrested, Andrew Djin, Nkrumah’s envoy to the DRC, intervened to secure his release but the damage was already done. On 14 September, Mobutu announced that the army had seized power and suspended civilian rule; Kasavubu hurriedly signed a decree to legalise Mobutu’s ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... secretary of state for education, England had 203 academies. Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... had graced the state flag since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the then Georgia Governor asked the ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... the means of joy, be also supplied by their local councils.’ In 1930, an MP observed that a young person today lives in a municipal house, and he washes himself … in municipal water. He rides on a municipal tram or omnibus, and I have no doubt that before long he will be riding in a municipal aeroplane. He walks on a municipal road; he is educated in ...

Not Much like Consent

Daniel Trilling: Crisis at the Met, 30 March 2023

Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police 
by Tom Harper.
Biteback, 446 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 78590 768 5
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Tango Juliet Foxtrot: How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing? 
by Iain Donnelly.
Biteback, 341 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 78590 716 6
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... stops of women, known as ‘booty patrols’. The following month, the Met paid damages to two young Black men who had been stopped and searched without cause and handcuffed for twenty minutes outside their East London home. An officer involved in the search turned out to have posted frequently in a racist and sexist WhatsApp group chat, one of many used ...
... The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately involved in street crime since they are, as we know, disadvantaged in employment, housing and education, and they are bound, therefore, to be more often the targets of aggressive policing. The two ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing ...

Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair, 22 February 1996

Blake 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85619 278 4
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol I: Jerusalem 
editor David Bindman, edited by Morton D. Paley.
Tate Gallery, 304 pp., £48, August 1991, 1 85437 066 9
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Andrew Lincoln.
Tate Gallery, 210 pp., £39.50, August 1991, 1 85437 068 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol III: The Early Illuminated Books 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 288 pp., £48, August 1993, 1 85437 119 3
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los 
editor David Bindman, edited by D.W. Dörbecker.
Tate Gallery, 368 pp., £50, May 1995, 1 85437 154 1
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. V: Milton, a Poem 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 224 pp., £48, November 1993, 1 85437 121 5
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Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. VI: The Urizen Books 
 editor David Bindman, edited by David Worrall.
Tate Gallery, 232 pp., £39.50, May 1995, 9781854371553
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... unlikely subjects. A taste for the primitive, the botched and hobbled. A sentimental attachment to young orphans and drowned sailors. Hayley had a considerable, if transitory reputation, both as verse-maker and biographer (Milton, Cowper). His poetry might have been bad enough for him to have been offered the Laureateship, but the ‘Lives’ which he produced ...

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
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... of a neo-Nazi youth network to murder a Labour MP. According to Hope not Hate, a growing number of young men are attracted to violence and are becoming ‘increasingly ideologically fluid’ in the ways they justify their impulses. In August 2021, a 22-year-old man in Plymouth shot and killed five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl. He had ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... opposition to Darwin as it is of the early 21st century. There are almost certainly more ‘young earth creationists’ – those claiming that the world was created in exactly six 24-hour days somewhere between 5700 and 10,000 years ago – among the educated and semi-educated classes now than there were in Darwin’s time.The historical Darwin is only ...

Who Cares?

Jean McNicol, 9 February 1995

The Report of the Inquiry into the Care and Treatment of Christopher Clunis 
by Jean Ritchie, Donald Dick and Richard Lingham.
HMSO, 146 pp., £9.50, February 1994, 0 11 701798 1
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Creating Community Care: Report of the Mental Health Foundation into Community Care for People with Severe Mental Illness 
by William Utting.
Mental Health Foundation, 76 pp., £9.50, September 1994, 0 901944 17 3
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Finding a Place: A Review of Mental Health Services for Adults 
HMSO, 94 pp., £11, November 1994, 0 11 886143 3Show More
The Falling Shadow: One Patient’s Mental Health Care. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Events Leading up to and Surrounding the Fatal Incident at the Edith Morgan Centre, Torbay, on 1 September 1993 
by Louis Blom-Cooper, Helen Hally and Elaine Murphy.
Duckworth, 230 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 7156 2662 0
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... from Dulwich North contacted Chase Farm and was told that Christopher Clunis was ‘a difficult young man who just wanted a bed’, that Chase Farm doubted the diagnosis of schizophrenia and refused to accept any responsibility for him. On 6 May a nurse at Dulwich North noted that he was carrying a cutlery knife around. On 12 May, having been described as ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... expressing dutiful regrets at the shadows or side effects of progress. Inside Putin’s Russia by Andrew Jack, the paper’s Moscow correspondent, illustrates the genre. Decent space is accorded the failings of the regime, and proper anxiety voiced about the future of liberties under it, without dwelling unnecessarily on these – ‘criticising without ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... they will almost certainly cross that boundary, but until it is crossed, it is possible for the young and middle-aged to regard the old as if oldness is their essential nature. It isn’t a lack of compassion; after all, for the not-elderly, the elderly are their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Partly it’s a problem of scale. Your mother ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... began to make an important contribution to steamboat revenues, though, as the marine historian Andrew Clark notes, ‘it was the enthusiastically reported visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1847 that glamorised and popularised the West Highlands for the wider world, opening up the region’s commercial potential for keen-eyed ...