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
Show More
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
Show More
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
Show More
Show More
... by the Wanless (2006) and Barker (2014) reports, both commissioned by the King’s Fund (a health charity); the government commissioned the 2011 Dilnot report into care and the 2013 Cavendish review of the care workforce. Each recommended a major overhaul in funding and provision. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the dying days of the Brown ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... Ryan, the tough, smart, patriotic family man played by Harrison Ford in the movies based on the Tom Clancy novels, and the archangel Michael.There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany and many other countries, and endorsed by a number of Republican candidates – you make it sound ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... production staff should have taken a hand in helping along the various competitions, phone-ins and charity programmes is unsurprising. Back in the 1960s, when I had my first experience of TV studios, the audience went largely unmanaged. In comedy programmes there was a warm-up beforehand and a PA might cue the applause or start it, supposedly ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... all their beloved pets; cats and dogs (Keeper, Grasper, Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, Flossy, Black Tom, Tiger) but also a rescued pheasant and hawk. Already we are acquainted with some of the peculiarities of the individuals – their politics, their passions (anecdotes make us feel like we know them quite well) – and we have probably been ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... possible to see a potential harmony between Quaker ideals of simplicity, temperance, pacifism and charity and the handsome profits made by Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in his biography ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... wearing no socks. Heels like turnips.6 February. A. asks for help with finding questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s tomb at Durham, presumably mixing up George Eliot and Adam Bede.Q. Where in Oxford would you ...

Taste, Tact and Racism

Ian Hamilton: The death of Princess Diana, 22 January 1998

Assassination of a Princess 
by Ahmad Ata.
Dar Al-Huda, 75 pp., £5, September 1997, 977 5340 23 3
Show More
Diana: A Princess Killed by Love 
by Ilham Sharshar.
Privately published, 125 pp., £10, September 1998, 977 5190 95 9
Show More
Who Killed Diana? 
by Muhammad Ragab.
Privately published, 127 pp., £5, September 1998, 977 08 0675 7
Show More
Harrods: A Place in Knightsbridge 
by Tim Dale.
Harrods, 224 pp., £35, November 1995, 1 900055 01 5
Show More
Show More
... it as racist. Edward Said, for instance, spoke of ‘an orgy of racist fantasy and sexual peeping tom-ism’. ‘It was as if every threadbare Orientalist cliché about “fabled” Oriental wealth and sexual prowess was marshalled to conquer (read “violate”) the blonde English snow fairy,’ he wrote in al-Ahram Weekly. And in impressive support of his ...

Architectures of Containment

Clair Wills: Ireland’s Lost Children, 20 May 2021

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes 
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020Show More
Show More
... and Public Health, later the Department of Health, their local health authority, or a Catholic charity seeking assistance because they had nowhere to go and no money. Women were brought to mother and baby homes by their parents or other family members without being consulted as to their destination.These findings have been met with outrage. Individuals who ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... sex reassignment surgery from the age of 18. Cassie Wilson’s daughter Melanie announced he was Tom at the age of two and a half (now five, he has annual appointments at the Tavistock); Callum King decided she was Julia as soon as she could talk. In 2014, the mental health charity Pace surveyed 2000 young people who were ...