The poet Alice Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. She was Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, and her lectures are available online. But this is her... Read more »
Like many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair’s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium... Read more »
In February 1965, the civil rights activist Malcolm X visited Smethwick, in the Midlands, where the Conservative-run council was planning to buy up houses to stop the area becoming a “coloured ghetto”.... Read more »
One tedious aspect of Britain’s post-imperial melancholia is the number of amateur historians who would rather we stopped going on about our role in the slave trade. Isn’t it all in the past? Weren’t... Read more »
A “landmark” novel written collaboratively by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers, fusing pre-colonial Yolngu oral history with western novelistic storytelling, has won the $80,000 Prime Minister’s Literary award for fiction. A Piece of... Read more »
Early in this book, Jared Diamond proudly introduces “what I term ‘the Hamlet test’”, which helps decide whether prominent individuals really make a difference, or whether others might have done just as... Read more »
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this... Read more »
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Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed,... Read more »