Category: Book reviews
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Find a loose thread, and pull!
Did you know that the average lifespan of a state is 326 years? What’s even more exciting is that mega-states – hierarchical organisations of control that cover more than one logical, geographic area – only last an average of 155 years. Did you know that the overarching reason for states’ extreme obsession with secrecy is…
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It’s hard work, being a law-abiding citizen
It’s also sometimes hard to believe that’s the best thing to do. From the Kinder Trespass to the anti-genocide ‘granarchists’, it’s hard to see what, if not organised rule-breaking, could win the case for humanity — but let’s give it a go. I certainly believe the thing to do is to apply your best brain…
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This is about more than Killing Corbynism
The response to Corbyn’s leadership was not the result of random events. It was the culmination of a strategy that had been instigated by the State of Israel and developed over time, with the involvement of some of the main players in what would become Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’. – Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Killing Corbynism The picture…
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The hair-raising transformation of a SPAD
[Note to Hastings: I am three blogs behind myself, because I was stuck on this book review. On the one hand, there’s the angry, bitter, political version, reflecting the rage and dread we’re all feeling; on the other, a positive review, full of admiration and falling over itself to tell everything I learned — because…
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Fly Trap
I remember reading The Fly as a teenager. I’d seen the film – the 1950s version, not the 1980s one – we kids were rather keen on sitting up late on Saturdays to watch daft old horror movies but, as you’re probably already thinking, Katherine Mansfield’s story of the same name is nothing like that.…
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Requiem for a Woman’s Soul
I’ve been trying since last week to write a blog about the election but so far, it’s a mess. It’s a mess because I keep failing to sleep at bedtime and/or I wake at the very weird hour of four ay em. That’s not, actually, because of the latest horror story to come out of…
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Bookshop to bookshop railway
Or, what I did on my holidays We had booked a week in Settle. The aim was to ride up and down the Settle to Carlisle railway, finding great Yorkshire walks and interesting bookshops and above all, avoiding the internet and all things work and big-media related. We succeeded, and I came home feeling renewed.…
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A truly terrible book
I picked this book up because it’s subtitled Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, and it got a further punch of urgency from the strapline by Eric Idle, ‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’. I thought it might be about one of the emergencies the great and the…
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Complicated?
I still see people around social media saying ‘it’s complicated’. I still see them pointing out creases and chasms in the history of Palestine which they use to suggest firstly, it’s hard to see who Palestine ‘belongs to’ and secondly – and incredibly – that this difficulty means they can’t roundly oppose mass killing, displacement,…
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Fly a kite, tell a story, read a book…
In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’. Jaser spoke eloquently about the…
Kay Green 