Category: Book reviews
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From Hastings to Gaza
Through this coming half term week, there is a series of workshops, and an exhibition of poetry and art for, by and about Palestinian children. Whether you want to spend a few minutes in the quiet hall, just looking at the paintings, to sit down and make use of the art materials provided to write…
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“Do more!”
Did you think it was you being childish, impatient? Did politicians manage to convince you that they’re more sophisticated than you, did they say they are not ‘playing safe’, they are ‘playing a longer game’? Among her reasons for not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, my MP assured me that the government was doing…
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Wilful Ignorance
I went to a discussion event in Brighton last week, and have been watching the furore around it on TwitX ever since. This was an unchaired discussion between Hannah Barnes and Helen Lewis on child-transition, puberty blockers and the various controversies around that topic. Looking at the #TimeToTalk tweets on the night, these were the…
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Curséd Be Boulangism
Set aside all your tired arguments for using cash and relearning the art of stepping outside without a Smartphone. You’re absolutely right, but doesn’t it get a bit boring, arguing for the bleedin’ obvious, on everything from privacy and the NHS to trying to stop a genocide? Take a short break, pop down to the…
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The Battle of the Land
This is the latest result of a favourite pastime of mine. One of the main reasons I still hang onto a library ticket and the habit of walking into actual buildings with actual books in them is the opportunity it gives to meander around and let things you didn’t know you wanted to read catch…
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Who is to blame?
Acquisitive Europeans set the world up as a colonialist enterprise. The worst of them went for the worst form of colonizing – the sort where settlers either destroy or dispossess the indigenous population. People from all over the world went to ‘The New World’ and created the United States by executing a particularly nasty example…
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What every women’s rights campaigner wants for Christmas
The glorious wave of new feminist books published in this decade has been one of the joys of the women’s rights campaign. For a while, my favourite was Julie Bindel’s Feminism for Women… Oh hang on, before that there was Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women… A lot of people swear by Helen Joyce’s TRANS, but…
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What are you laughing at?
I could tell a tale of a catastrophic accident at the printers, where sixty grandsworth of gargantuan printing machine is fouled up by someone feeding Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity into one end and Helen Joyce’s TRANS into the other, and turning the feed up to max. But that would be to entirely miss the point.…
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They may not exist but they keep producing good work
In the month that the Scottish courts finally went so far down the rabbit hole they’ve succeeded in convincing themselves that women don’t exist as a material entity, the tabloid press have reached the point where most people are aware that something rather silly is going on but most have yet to realize the gravity…
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A land of remembering and forgetting
“For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country … Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of…
Kay Green 