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The beginning of a lifetime’s work?
A guest post by Philippa Tudor I first encountered Holst’s music through singing his beautiful 8-part Ave Maria as a teenager, and knew that he had taught at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich – where I live – but I never got round to discovering more until 2012, when I ordered a secondhand copy…
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How did our country become “Rip off Britain?”
Distractions, distractions We’re so good at distractions. Somehow, there’s always something to stop us thinking about what we need to deal with. Where was our attention, when Jimmy Savile waggled the old eyebrows and said “I’m hiding in plain sight”? Where was our attention when Johnny Rotten warned everyone about him? Where was our attention…
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Postman Pat and the sweet shop lady
Two treasured memories from my childhood. Where I lived when I was a kid, the sweet shop on the corner was also a Post Office. When I moved to Hastings, I used to use the Post Office counter in the bookshop on the seafront — and I still prefer the one in that little supermarket…
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If you’re not a big rally person be a local picket person
And what to do if you too want to fight back against government-induced austerity but you can’t do either of those things. Thursday and Saturday were both RMT strike days. There are still people working on our railways who are campaigning to reach a basic living wage… …whilst the railway execs continue to get ridiculously…
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On resisting “bubble thinking”
From Gary Lineker through Brexit to women’s rights via Timothy Snyder ***Long read*** Let’s go back in time and give some attention to how we got here, and how we might go about getting to a better place. This is a discussion about a YouTube clip from Channel Four, of Krishnan Guru-Murthy talking to Timothy…
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Is your bookshop hiding anything from you?
In the last few weeks, Hannah Barnes’ new book, Time to Think has been eagerly awaited. Anxious parents are concerned about schools being told to keep secrets from them, and about what their children are learning about sex and gender on TikTok. In political circles, the existence or otherwise of ‘innate gender identity’ is a…
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“A dark journey into what ails America”
In his 2022 book The Storm is Here, US-born journalist Luke Mogelson starts out, surrounded by the heavily armed members of various self-instigated militias, talking to a barber who defied lockdown over ‘the right to a haircut’. It’s not entirely clear who is there defending what from whom, although the New World Order, the Russians,…
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Oh alright, I’ll talk about toilets again
For the last five years, I have regularly had people throw that one about “are you going to look up people’s skirts in the loos” at me, and I have regularly had people say to me, “don’t mixed sex toilets solve the problem”. I generally answered – truthfully, that the women’s sex based rights campaign…
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A Radical Review
What I learned from Issue Eight – ‘the disputes edition’ – of The Radical Notion and from reading Maya Forstater’s critique of it Click here for a TRN download link. Click here to buy a paper copy of TRN. Just in case you’re thinking about last summer and saying… Oh, no, please, no! …this, after…
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The Jaguar Smile
This is a review of The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie. I read it in 2023 because… From time to time, I like revisiting ‘old’ books, because until I was involved in the book trade, I didn’t know how casually ‘back list’ books are treated, nor how easily they can drop off into the ‘not…
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Nicola Sturgeon, Labour & Gender Identity Ideology
***Guest post by Ian McNee*** Nicola Sturgeon is not a stupid politician. Arrogant? Maybe. Another centrist oiling the wheels of capitalism (albeit with tartan stripes)? Definitely. And while there is almost certainly some truth in her claim that holding high public office has taken its toll on her, she could see that the fallout from…
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Kay Green 