Jonathan Rée
Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
Useful summary of the origins of neo-liberalism (as well as bio of Hayek). It is all rather more nuanced than people make out (of course).
"Today that term [neo-liberalism] is used mainly as shorthand for a set of right-wing policies espoused in the 1970s by Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and by miscellaneous demented conservatives ever since: ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘empowering the individual’ through privatisation, tax cuts and deregulation. But before that it referred to a body of theory about markets and how they work which deserves to be treated with respect."
Hayek had particular disdain for Comte and positivism, blaming him/it for justifying totalitarianism.
Letters
Tim Smedley, Neil Foxlee, Gareth Evans, Julia Brannen, Bruce Johnson, Claire Spencer, Ben Fletcher-Watson, Charles Turner
Letters...
Michael Wood
At the Movies: Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’
The 1968 film is about to appear in a digital restoration.
Andrew O’Hagan
Spare by Prince Harry
A review of *that* book. O'Hagan reckons it is quite a good read, but...
Mary Hannity
The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State by Shaul Bar-Haim
"The poor health of soldiers fighting in the Boer War made the state of the nation’s young men a matter of public concern. The blame wasn’t put on urban poverty, however, but on ‘ignorance on the part of mothers of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it." Plus ça change!
Maureen N. McLane
HERmione by H.D. Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. by Donna Krolik Hollenberg
The American poet Hilda Doolittle only ever published as H.D. Born in 1886
Simon Wren-Lewis
Short Cuts: Above Public Opinion
The current round of strikes.
"Public sector pay has increased at a lower rate than private sector pay almost every year since 2011."
"Yet a worldwide presence is not the same as being a guru to the world. Vedantism did not become the faith of the globe... ... Vivekananda's memory has fallen captive to Hindutva chauvinism in the land of his birth. Narendra Modi garlands his statues with flowers..."
He doesn't like what she have done to Battersea power station and she surrounding areas!
A novel about the Shakers
Michael Ledger-Lomas
Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda by Ruth Harris
"Yet a worldwide presence is not the same as being a guru to the world. Vedantism did not become the faith of the globe... ... Vivekananda's memory has fallen captive to Hindutva chauvinism in the land of his birth. Narendra Modi garlands his statues with flowers..."
Owen Hatherley
In Battersea
He doesn't like what she have done to Battersea power station and she surrounding areas!
Ange Mlinko
The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks
A novel about the Shakers
"the most lovable of the sects that emerged from waves of 19th-century American religious revivals, many of which originated in New York state's 'burned-over district'. Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism proved the most durable, but countless social experiments - Fourierism, feminism, abolitionism, spiritualism, socialism, polyamorism - had their moment."
Schiff's Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of false news,a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade.
Colin Kidd
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
Schiff's Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of false news,a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade.
Adams was the only downwardly mobile Founding Father.
[D]ubious conspiracy theories and MAGA-like mob action were also the birthpangs of American independence.
Michael Kulikowski
When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics by Frank L. Holt Coin Hoards and Hoarding in the Roman World edited by Jerome Mairat, Andrew Wilson and Chris Howgego
Huge numbers of ancient coins have been found, but they haven't been given anything like the respect they deserve academically.
"With coins, all but the most splendid rarities cost less than a mediocre Roman bust, while at the lower end of the market, Pokémon cards are a better investment."
James Davidson
At the British Museum: The Phonetic Hieroglyphic Alphabet
"In the end it was as simple as "L is for lion', it rather, 'lion is for L'.". - unlocking hieroglyphs.
Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border by Timothy Phillips On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey
"What most surprises [Timothy Phillips] on his trip is the depth and breadth of the Ostalgie (nostalgia for communism) that he encountered among many of the borders residents he talks to."
On the Russia China border, the Chinese side is much more developed and thriving than the Russian side.
Polish Jew Isaac Deutscher's experience in the UK during the war.
Gonzalo Pozo
I must start completely alone
Polish Jew Isaac Deutscher's experience in the UK during the war.
"Deutscher and others like him remain virtually unknown in Poland. The existence of a certain degree of Polish antisemitism during the war and in the army in exile is now admitted, but the revolutionary tradition to which Deutscher belonged has been written out of Poland’s historical memory. It was persecuted by the Sanacja regime in Warsaw and by Stalin before the war, and it was banished from the record in the Polish People’s Republic. Under Poland’s current rulers, the right-wing Law and Justice Party, the erasure continues."
An aside, the concept of "Revolutionary Defeatism": that socialists want their country to lose so as to foment revolution.
Jorie Graham
Poem: ‘Then the Rain’
after years of virga, after
much almost
& much never again, after
coalescing in dry
...
Ben Walker
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
"Speculative climate fiction". Putting a price on species extinction.
Rahmane Idrissa
Diary: In Bamako
"Also at odds with Islam in Mali are the Kemetists, whose faith draws freely on ancient Egyptian religion and the pantheon of Egyptian gods"
"Kemetism became an orthodox religion in Chicago in the late 1980s, thanks to Tamara Siuda, who was undergoing initiation as a Wiccan priestess when, she claims, she was contacted by Egyptian deities. Illinois gave Kemetism legal recognition in 1993, at the beginning of the internet era. It spread to Europe and Africa mostly by means of online forums and platforms. While there are minor chapters in Burkina and Niger, Kemetism in the Sahel is found mostly in Mali"
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