Shriek of the Milkman

John Gallagher: London Hawking, 2 November 2023

Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London 
by Charlie Taverner.
Oxford, 256 pp., £30, January 2023, 978 0 19 284694 5
Show More
Show More
... in the street by a man roaring ‘You are a whore, you are a private whore, and you Know your self to be a whore’ – to physical and sexual assault: a woman selling oysters was raped by three men at a Newgate Street tavern in 1753. Over time, male hawkers become more visible (and audible) in the records, though Taverner argues that this was not because ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
Show More
Show More
... which drew on images of workers in popular culture to argue that organised labour is no longer a self-conscious power in American life. In both, he was able to weave class, culture, politics and ideology into a consistent narrative and to connect local histories with national and global events. The same qualities are evident in Freedom’s Dominion. The book ...

Smoke and Lava

Rosemary Hill: Vesuvius Observed, 5 October 2023

Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions 
by John Brewer.
Yale, 513 pp., £30, October, 978 0 300 27266 6
Show More
Show More
... entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily limited. Brewer’s plan to use it as ‘a database and as a finding aid’ works – up to a ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
Show More
Show More
... the end ‘ethnographic Surrealism’ (to borrow a term from James Clifford) aimed to estrange the self rather than to understand the other; in L’Afrique fantôme, for example, we learn far more about its author, Michel Leiris, than we do about Africa. Contemporary exhibitions such as Surrealism beyond Borders at Tate Modern and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean ...

When Labour Was New

Malcolm Petrie: Labour’s First Government, 20 June 2024

The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government 
by Peter Clark.
Haus, 293 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 913368 81 4
Show More
The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., £20, January, 978 1 3994 1143 1
Show More
Show More
... leaders that they will be able to soften any reforms through a consultation process. These self-imposed strictures reminded me of a scene in the memoirs of David Kirkwood, who in 1922 became the Labour MP for Dumbarton Burghs. Kirkwood, a member of the ILP and a supporter of Scottish home rule, recalled that soon after his arrival in Parliament, he ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Election Night in Glasgow, 18 July 2024

... and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed people to self-identify their legal sex but was blocked by the Tory government in Westminster) further alienated voters. Even more damaging was the creeping realisation that the SNP, like Labour before it, had failed to deliver on council tax reform, education or ...

Macron’s Dance

Jeremy Harding: France and Israel, 4 July 2024

... victory in the Six-Day War.In France, with its record of collaboration in the murder of the Jews, self-discovery by descendants and survivors of the Holocaust had to be taken one cautious step at a time. Many far-right French revanchists who regretted the loss of Algeria were also passionate antisemites and it paid for the Jewish community not to cause a ...

Damnable Rottenness

Lucy Wooding: More and More, 6 November 2025

Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England 
by Joanne Paul.
Michael Joseph, 604 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 1 4059 5360 3
Show More
Show More
... moved effortlessly between genres, and were masters of irony and allusion. They were also adept at self-fashioning, to the point of complete deception. High-minded, sorrowful and penetrating indictments of court corruption and the evils of politics were written by men who were prospering in political life or desperately seeking political ...

Kaboom!

Lorraine Daston: Slow-Motion Extinction, 23 October 2025

Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction 
by Sadiah Qureshi.
Allen Lane, 470 pp., £30, June 2025, 978 0 241 35210 6
Show More
Show More
... customs and shared ancestry. The difficulty can’t be evaded simply by accepting a group’s self-identification, which often incorporates similar analogies to natural kinds. Perhaps this is why Qureshi, who is well aware of the abuses of race terminology, vacillates between describing the humans facing extinction as ‘nations’, ‘native ...

Guns, Money and Opium

Laleh Khalili, 19 February 2026

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces 
by Seth Harp.
Viking, 357 pp., £22.50, August 2025, 978 0 593 65508 5
Show More
Show More
... deferred to the military, as it often did, and accepted Lavigne’s claim that he had fired in self-defence.What unfurls is an astonishing narrative about the wages of the US’s covert wars abroad in the last quarter-century. Leshikar and Lavigne are not the only special forces operators whose stories of drug use and narcotic-related deaths are ...

No One Can Live on Iron

Oliver Cussen: History after Climate Change, 7 May 2026

The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last Five Hundred Years 
by Sunil Amrith.
Penguin, 432 pp., £12.99, September 2025, 978 0 14 199386 7
Show More
Show More
... such weighty consequences.’ Increased population density led to the revival of trade and urban self-government; ‘seigneurial anarchy’, Bloch argued, was slowly being eclipsed by the modernising forces of the centralising state and the bourgeois freedom it allowed. Economic revival in France in particular took the form of internal, intensive ...

Worker, Hipster, Banker

Susan Pedersen: Modern British Cities, 23 July 2026

The Modern British City 1945-2000 
edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith.
Lund Humphries, 496 pp., £65, November 2025, 978 1 84822 729 3
Show More
Show More
... to dangerous traffic by blocking roads. Architecture students, Holly Smith shows, supported ‘self-build’ housing initiatives and squatters. Immigrant communities created festivals and cultural institutions: Elizabeth Buettner sensitively recovers Naseem Khan’s decades of effective and joyful activism. Gay enclaves emerged in London, Manchester and ...

The Greening of Mrs Donaldson

Alan Bennett: A Story, 9 September 2010

... Nothing was said in the advert about acting ability or Mrs Donaldson would not have applied; self-confidence wasn’t mentioned either, which would have been another deterrent as Mrs Donaldson had always thought of herself as shy. It was a point not lost on Gwen to whom she was unwise enough to mention her application. ‘For a start you don’t like ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... despite the evidence of her medical file, how alert and full of good humour and lacking in self-pity. She had bruising from the steroid-induced thinness of her skin and, as she told me, she couldn’t see my face, a few feet away. She had her legs up on the sofa (on top of everything else, she has a collapsing spine) and when she moved it was with the ...

Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
Show More
Show More
... they feed on themselves. Conspiracies, corruption. We are all too easily swallowed into a self-sustaining, multivoiced protest entity, a sack of squabbling cats certain of one thing: defeat. To get back to the river I had to follow one of the less celebrated streams, the Northern Outfall Sewer, now rebranded as the Olympic Park Greenway. It seemed ...