Michael J Sandel opens What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) with a list (3-5) of some novel items that can be bought: In California prisoners can pay $82 a night for better, quieter cells. $8 to drive alone in a car pool lane during rush hour in […]
The best joke in the Finnish Nazis-on-the-moon movie Iron Sky is, ironically, also the one that best demonstrates the film’s weaknesses. Idealistic Nazi teacher, Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), shows her young class a sharply edited (ten minutes long) version of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and, as the Jewish barber disguised as Hynkel dances with the […]
I want to start this post by saying plainly that I believe that it is possible for writers to create important and insightful work about cultures to which they do not belong. There is a somewhat crude (but, it seems to me, increasingly common) form of postcolonial criticism – often proceeding from a partial, or […]
I first read some of Frank O’Connor’s short stories (and translated Irish poetry) when I was at school and they made an impression because when I picked up a second hand collection recently, some of the stories came back to me word for word and, I realised, they’d been pickling in my brain for decades. […]
Chris Beckett’s third novel, Dark Eden, is a complex thing. It draws, as the title suggests, on the ur-biblical theme of the fall from innocence but it is also the story of an isolated human community culturally (and physically) devolving. It belongs to a sfnal tradition that has its roots in works like Lord of […]
Dark Lies the Island (Jonathan Cape, 2012) is Kevin Barry’s second collection of short stories, following There are Little Kingdoms (2007) and his spectacular first novel, City of Bohane (2011). Given the long and rich history of Irish writers exploiting the short form, from the roots of the Irish oral storytelling tradition through the unavoidable […]
This piece was written as part of the BSFA’s Vector Reviewers’ Poll for 2011. Vector reviewers get to nominate their five favourite books of the previous year. In 2011 my five were: Silver Wind, Nina Allan (Eibonvale Press) City of Bohane, Kevin Barry (Jonathan Cape) The Islanders, Christopher Priest (Gollancz) By Light Alone, Adam Roberts […]
If Britain were going to have a superhero team made up of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual characters, then you’d expect them to live in Brighton. It’s the obvious choice. But that’s about the only predictable thing in Martin Eden’s indie comic series, Spandex. There’s an awful lot to like in these books, the twisty-turny […]
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism by George A Akerlof and Robert J Shiller (Princeton University Press, 2010) starts with the argument that traditional economic models based on rational actors and perfect markets cannot explain the economic crisis we currently face and cannot point us in […]
I always have more than one book on the go at any given time. There is always one novel and one work of non-fiction work (usually something on politics, history or economics) on the go. Actually, I’m usually part way through several works of non-fiction at any given time and, when I commuted, I was […]