Category: Book reviews
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Come on in, it’s what you’ve been dreaming of…?
It sets off as a second person narrative, and doesn’t give you a name. He’s wading through a typical day which may or may not be the same as yours, but you’ll relate to the wading. And then something weird happens. I think everyone from H G Wells to David Nobbs has written this story […]
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Why lefties need a big book about anti-Semitism
this book is a valuable, unique reference book – Moshé Machover I’m not Jewish, and until I joined the Labour Party, I was for the most part unaware which of the people around me were Jewish. By contrast, I found out which of my new Labour Party associates were Jewish very quickly, mostly when they […]
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Unfiltered indeed
#chillaxing with my faves @HolisticHazel and @PollysFewBits #MamasNightOut #MamasOnTheLoose #partay #besties Er…. okay. This article will eventually be a piece about Unfiltered by Sophie White, but first I’d like to explain how I became cool by sheer negligence. Yep – it’s true – your friendly neighbourhood pavement-pounding blogger does not have a SMARTphone (I only […]
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What do words mean? A prediction, and a scrap of advice for 2023
2023 will be a year to choose your words carefully and stand by them, and it will be a year in which doing so may cause your opponents to froth at the mouth. It may also result in your being arrested, and actually charged, for uttering illegal words. These days, I have a slight nag […]
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The “no debate” debate
I thought I’d wave goodbye to 2022 with an appeal for a re-discovery of the ability to disagree without dying. I am the proud owner of a review copy of Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust. I’ve read quite a bit of it, and when I’ve finished, I’ll be doing a proper review but today, […]
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The Subject of Desire
I always hate it when a “sexuality” question turns up in all those random forms you have to fill in. Even when you get past “do I want to tell you this,” you still have the problem of what to put – is a bi woman lesbian when she has a female partner? Is she […]
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Half a Yellow Sun and the Whole of the Moon
Think of the starving children in Biafra. If you’re my age, you’ll remember being told that, probably over the pig-bins in the school dining room. Kids used to joke, asking if the school would send the contents of the pig-bins to Biafra. What did they know? My life changed a lot after my first visit […]
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What’s Nigel doing these days?
In the front of our first ever poetry anthology, Routemasters and Mushrooms, I wrote, “the works speak for themselves. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. We intend this collection to be the first of many.” That was 2006. The winning poem, which opens the book, is by Nigel Humphreys. The writers […]
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We girls were double-divided
There’s a puzzling range of controversies raging over ‘entertainment’ and ‘the arts’. Social justice warriors are busy finding items – books, films, statues, to condemn for racism, and whilst libraries obediently bury offending books, the women’s movement battles over misogynistic and mind-bending traditions such as nightclub drag queens crossing yet more boundaries to present as […]
Kay Green 