Month: September 2014

  • Review: Stephen Edgar’s Exhibits of the Sun

    To say that the pace of modern life is unconducive to lyric poetry is not so much to flirt with cliché as to drop your keys down cliché’s blouse and insist upon retrieving them. It’s also undeniable. Assailed from all sides by all manner of trivia, we’ve lost the habit of sustained contemplation needed to…

  • Comrade Tressell’s Problem Novel: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists at 100

    Comrade Tressell’s Problem Novel: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists at 100

    ‘The trouble with you socialists is that you don’t know anything about economics.’ The businessman – a wealthy retailer – was talking to a miner in Western Australia. ‘What you don’t seem to understand’, he continued, ‘is that every time you get an increase in your wages, the cost of living rises with them.’ ‘So…

  • Fissures in reality: a review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God

    In a career spanning nearly half a century, the US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has sought to expose economic inequality and to critique the utopian and delusional character of the arguments used to justify it. In Nickel and Dimed (2001) she revealed how the lives of unskilled workers give the lie to ‘trickledown’ economics, while in…

  • The political earthquake shaking New Zealand

    Having arrived in Christchurch in the small hours of the morning, I have to wait till my alarm call comes through at 8am for my first proper view of it. It’s a disconcerting experience. It is now four years since the Canterbury earthquake caused widespread damage to ‘the Garden City’ and three and a half…