Category: Literature

  • Review of Who’s Black and Why?

    Review of Who’s Black and Why?

    In 1741, the exalted members of the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences met to consider sixteen essays written in response to the following question: ‘What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?’

  • Review of Harlem Nights, by Deidre O’Connell

    Review of Harlem Nights, by Deidre O’Connell

    ‘As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’

  • Review of Rogue Forces, by Mark Willacy

    Review of Rogue Forces, by Mark Willacy

    The publication of Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces coincided almost exactly with the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The coincidence was a happy one, no less so for occurring in unhappy circumstances.

  • Politically Challenged

    Politically Challenged

    The word ‘challenging’ in the title of Challenging Politics functions as both an adjective and a verb: an adjective in the sense that its author, Scott Ryan, thinks that politics should be challenging; and a verb in the sense that this conception of politics is currently being challenged.

  • The Rome Zoo, by Pascal Janovjak

    The Rome Zoo, by Pascal Janovjak

    In his extraordinary novel The Rome Zoo, French author Pascal Janovjak uses the eponymous institution to observe one species in particular: not the imperious lions or the mischievous chimps or the pygmy hippopotami, all of which are there in the background, but the human beings that would remove those animals from their natural habitats and…

  • Go Slow and Break Things

    Go Slow and Break Things

    The short decade between the global debt crisis and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency was a time of great excitement on the Left. Like the devil in Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler, capitalism’s power had been based on its ability to convince the world that it didn’t exist; but in the months and…

  • On Kate Holden’s The Winter Road

    On Kate Holden’s The Winter Road

    ‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’ So wrote the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) …

  • Review of The High Road (Quarterly Essay), by Laura Tingle

    Review of The High Road (Quarterly Essay), by Laura Tingle

    Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essays are about politics in the narrow sense. Unconcerned with Big Ideas – ideas of human flourishing, or of the status of the great political traditions – they take politics as ‘the art of the possible’ and judge its practitioners on their mastery of it. A key word in the essays is…

  • Review of Just Money, by Royce Kurmelovs

    Review of Just Money, by Royce Kurmelovs

    To date, Royce Kurmelovs has written four books and written off at least two cars … Newcomers to his work will hope that the young author is a better writer than he is a driver. Those, like me, who are familiar with it will know they’re in for a treat.

  • The network versus the hierarchy

    The network versus the hierarchy

    ‘IT IS EASIER to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’ So wrote the critical theorist Frederic Jameson in New Left Review in 2003, attributing the sentiment to an unnamed ‘someone’ whom posterity, with nothing else to go on, has decided to call Frederic Jameson.