Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Touching base with social change
GORDON PARSONS recommends an evocative exploration of how working-class attitudes have evolved over time in Britain
Stage managed: Black Friday, 2014
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Me Me Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England
by Jon Lawrence
(Oxford University Press, £25)
BASED on the testimony of a wide range of interviewees from the immediate post-war period to more recent times, the social studies in Jon Lawrence’s book are drawn from contrasting areas — Bermondsey and England’s first “new town” Stevenage in the 1940s and 1950s, Luton and Cambridge in the 1960s and Tyneside and the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the many illustrations in Me Me Me features a photograph of shoppers battling to secure the knock-down “bargains” on 2014’s Black Friday, a stage-managed event used by the media to show how traditional community spirit has given way to a relentlessly rising tide of selfishness and greed.
Yet Lawrence sets out to refute the generalised opinion that traditional community has been replaced by a consumer society dominated by the language and the ethos of markets “as the principal arbiter of public good.”
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
