Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
Show More
Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
Show More
Show More
... that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets Sam. Wesley, Daniel De Foe, and two or three of your Western martyrs that, had they liv’d, would have been extraordinary men of that kind, viz. Kitt. Battersby, young Jenkins, Hewlin, and many ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June, 978 0 241 65171 1
Show More
No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April, 978 0 00 830894 0
Show More
The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 0354 0991 4
Show More
The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
Show More
Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 83895 804 6
Show More
The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
Show More
Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 5299 2286 8
Show More
Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78590 857 6
Show More
Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 3985 1853 7
Show More
Show More
... of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years. In 2023, the RAC reported that the number of callouts for pothole-related ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
Show More
Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
Show More
Show More
... walking tour of northern England, Scotland and Ireland. They had walked more than six hundred miles when a letter arrived reporting that Tom’s illness had worsened. Sick now himself with a sore throat that would not resolve, Keats took a packet boat home from Inverness. All that autumn he watched his brother shiver as if in a palsy, spectre-thin and ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... net worth of $59 billion has been accrued from refineries, petrochemical plants, and thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines, to the detriment of clean air and water and the ability of the federal government to regulate and limit greenhouse gases. My daughter-in-law, mother of a 16-month-old child, directed my attention to research on the ‘body ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... The RebellionVII: The FactsFilm AudioI: The FireIt was​ a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always ...