Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... at heel but the spaces are generous and light. Looking up from the lobby you can see the teardrop cross-section of Lubetkin’s stairwell stretching up to the heights. In the early days children used to slide down the bannisters non-stop from the 15th floor to the ground. There’s an intimacy and a familiarity within this vertical community. When I ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... might suggest ... oh, never mind. Harvard seems bound to fulfil the prophetic title of the Amanda Cross murder mystery, Death in a Tenured Position, and to prove as true Cross’s implicit contention that anti-feminism among academics is not only destructive but positively lethal. French is very clear on the fact that the ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... resisted the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... darken and blur. The Blurred Lines of Grigoriadis’s title is an allusion to a notorious song by Robin Thicke, in which he repeats the line ‘I know you want it’ at least six times. The song is also the basis of an essay by Roxane Gay; one of the reasons she calls herself a ‘bad’ feminist is that she finds herself wanting to sing along. Blurred Lines ...

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

... Lynette White on the basis of a false confession – and that his defence team, Roger Thorn and Robin Patton, were bold enough to challenge the admissibility of his confession. It was left to them to get Heron safely out of Leeds Crown Court. A decoy police van was used to divert the attention of the angry crowd, while Patton put Heron in his car and drove ...

Prejudice Rules

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

... blocks of life, but also a steady stream of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides that cross the placenta as readily as residues from cigarettes and alcohol’. Indigenous, black and other poor communities of colour who because of the environmental racism of extractive industries live closest to coal mines, oil refineries, chemical plants and toxic ...

Barely under Control

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

... cheating. SATs are invigilated by classroom teachers, and although there are strict procedures for cross-checking, moderation and random inspections, it isn’t failsafe. Last month, one man was banned indefinitely from teaching after he ‘personally amended a range of pupil answers’. Sit in the pub with a group of teachers and sooner or later, you’ll ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... against that of China’s largest battery-maker, CATL, run by Zeng Yuqun, sometimes known as Robin Zeng. CATL is now worth $250 billion, more than BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Renault and Stellantis put together. When Vince Cable set up the APC in 2013, to address the transition to electric and self-driving vehicles, Zeng had already been in the ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... every issue raised by the action group, but it was never enough; they bombarded us with round-robin emails and to my knowledge we tried to keep on top of them. It’s not easy when the TMO had 6500 other social tenants and 2500 leaseholders to help in the borough. But this Grenfell group was political. They hated everything the council and the TMO did, no ...

The Clothes They Stood Up In

Alan Bennett, 28 November 1996

... passed wordlessly across the counter with Miss Dorsey’s patient, suffering smile (‘Our cross,’ it said) rather than taken from some promiscuous shelf in Timothy White’s. Though it was not long before Timothy White’s went the same way as Miss Dorsey, swallowed whole by Boots. Though Boots too, she felt, was a cut above the nearest ...