Search

This critical/creative essay takes the form of an imagined letter to my students. It suggests that in the online age we have come to see writing as angelic communion: intuitive, instantaneous, unmediated. Words hang briefly in the air as a discardable conveyance for shifting thought from one brain to another. Reading is a matter of swiping, skimming and scrolling, on touchscreens tailor-made for the smooth ingestion of content, which is what words have become in the age of big data. I urge my students to think instead of writing as embodied – something inseparable from that granular, glitch-ridden singularity, a human being. Because we are not angels, who are already word perfect, the right words only come to us at the end of long, unexciting work. Words fail us, or we fail them, but the failure is salutary and, in the end, a blessing. It teaches us to accept the otherness and unreadability of others. The letter form, a relic of the analogue age, concedes this inevitable distance between writer and reader, and the failure of writing to entirely bridge it. The letter writer must communicate imperfectly like a human being, not perfectly like an angel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This creative-critical essay tells the collective life story of couples, by drawing together memoir and other texts (film, art, photography, biographical fragments) and social observation. It is inspired by two things: the 'immersive coupledom' (Laura Kipnis's term) enforced by the Covid lockdowns; and a series of recent essaycum-memoirs that have explored the experience either of being single or being in a couple. These books note the resilience of 'the couple norm' even as feminist and LGBTQ+ movements have challenged other societal norms. My essay also examines my own life as a single man, but tangentially, by considering its opposite: coupledom. Unpacking the unquestioned norm of coupledom is, I argue, a way of thinking about the hidden strangeness of our mundane lives--how love and care get routinised, and how the stories we tell about human relationships become true by default. But I also suggest that coupledom can't just be reduced to a story, a heteronormative convention. A couple is, like the human beings who comprise it, a beautiful, maddening, undeterminable mess. Every couple is a social invention, but also a one-off, an anomaly, a dataset of one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MORE THAN A GAME A history of how sport made Britain DAVID HORSPOOL 336pp. John Murray. 25 [pounds sterling]. In his classic book Anyone but England: An outsider looks at [...]

HOW TO KNOW A PERSON The art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen DAVID BROOKS 320pp. Allen Lane. 25 [pounds sterling]. David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for the [...]

THE IMAGINATION MUSCLE Where good ideas come from (and how to have more of them) ALBERT READ 320pp. Constable. 20 [pounds sterling]. This book about the imagination begins, aptly enough, [...]

FANS A journey into the psychology of belonging MICHAEL BOND 256pp. Picador. 20 [pounds sterling]. 'Fannish devotion', Michael Bond writes, is a gregarious impulse.' As the subtitle of his book [...]

AWE The transformative power of everyday wonder DACHER KELTNER 336pp. Allen Lane. 25 [pounds sterling]. OVER THE CENTURIES the word awe and its derivatives have suffered what linguists call semantic [...]

TENANTS The people on the frontline of Britain's housing emergency VICKY SPRATT 352pp. Profile. 20 [pounds sterling]. DOWN AND OUT Surviving the homelessness crisis DANIEL LAVELLE 304pp. Wildfire. 18.99 [pounds [...]

EVERYONE'S A CRITIC How we can learn to be kind to ourselves JULIA BUENO 208pp. Virago. 16.99[pounds sterling]. IN HER NEARLY TWENTY YEARS as a psychotherapist, Julia Bueno has encountered [...]

UP IN SMOKE Stories from a life on fire LEIGH HOSY-PICKETT 272pp. Trapeze. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. A firefighter's life is well worth a book. Firefighters may be lionized and occasionally [...]

THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU A true story SAM KNIGHT 256pp. Faber. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. For most of human history, people have believed that we can see into the future. The Bible [...]

This article explores the concept of social mobility through the lens of my own family history. My parents were baby boomers, beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act and the opening of new universities in the 1960s. They were helped less by the meritocratic ideal of elite education than by more widely available benefits, such as public libraries, student grants, free time and a sense of not feeling driven into purely pragmatic choices. I argue that our stories of social mobility should pay more attention to how wider social histories interact with the idiosyncrasy and contingency of individual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE NOWHERE OFFICE Reinventing work and the workspace of the future JULIA HOBSBAWM 208pp. Basic. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. THE END OF BURNOUT Why work drains us and how to build [...]

ON REVISION The only writing that counts WILLIAM GERMANO 199pp. University of Chicago Press. $45 (paperback, $20). William Germano's On Revision takes a truism about writing --that it is mostly [...]

IN NORMAL TIMES, autumn for me means new beginnings. With the first damp chill in the air and the leaves fading, and just as our avian summer guests are heading [...]

EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE How we became postmodern STUART JEFFRIES 378pp. Verso. 20 [pounds sterling]. The most surprising sentence in Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How we became postmodern [...]

At around 10PM on April 3, the BBC journalist Dan Johnson filmed his drive through Central London to begin the night shift at Broadcasting House. The next day he posted [...]

The 'gentrification' of the inner residential districts of London, allowed the middle classes to be a part of the inner city and enjoy its amenities but separate and cut away from its social problems.

Richard Hoggart writes about young men meeting in milk- bars and listening to music from juke boxes in his 'The Uses of Literacy' and this passage is often cited as an example of Hoggart's suspicion of mass culture and a harking back to more 'authentic' working class culture. It is argued that Hoggart's anxiety was not so much about mass culture and Americanization as much as about cultural literacy, class and the losses and gains of rising affluence.

This article explores the history of crossing the road in Britain from the traffic acts of the early 1930s to the introduction of the Green Cross Code in the early 1970s. It reconstructs this history through the examination of government documents, press releases, newspaper articles, newsreels, public information films, and other road safety materials. Since the interwar period, British governments have become progressively more involved in policing the activity of crossing the road, and there have been two main planks of policy. The first has been to design progressively more sophisticated crossings; the second has been road safety education, including advice about how to use the crossings, disseminated through school crossing patrols, children's clubs, and public information films. Governments have generally relied on appeals to good sense and civic duty rather than legally enforceable rules about crossing the road, and have sought to follow as well as lead public opinion in determining how much to coerce both pedestrians and motorists. The formulation of policy in relation to public attitudes and media responses means that crossing the road during this period has interesting implications for both political and cultural history.

WHY WRITING MATTERS NICHOLAS DELBANCO 296pp. Yale University Press. 16.99 [pounds sterling] (US $26). A MORE ACCURATE TITLE for this book Would have been Why Teaching Writing Matters. Nicholas Delbanco, [...]

The Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 led many people to reassess their relationship to places. This article attempts, during this time of restricted movement, to imaginatively deep-map an island in the mouth of the Shannon in west Clare where my grandmother was born and raised. My deep-mapping of the island is by necessity virtual, assembled piecemeal from memories, daydreams, family recollections, historical fragments and that powerful, semi-enchanted sense of co-presence that can be found online. Unable to make a physical journey, I rely on the accretive and associative techniques of contemporary place writing. The article uses montage, juxtaposition, thick description, dense detail, imaginative reconstruction and the essayistic blending of undisciplined bits of knowledge, all of which do some of the work of conventional linear argument. As in place writing, the micro-study of a small, special place becomes a way of thinking more widely about our relationship to the earth in a time of environmental and public health emergency. The article is both my own experiment in place writing and an argument for the fresh perspectives that place writing can bring to cultural geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrea Komlosy WORK The last 1,000 years Translated by Jacob K. Watson with Loren Balhorn 272pp. Verso. 16.99 [pounds sterling] (US $26.95). 978 1 78663 410 8 David Graeber BULLSHIT [...]