GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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The corrosive megalomania of UK power elites
There is a disturbing circularity about Britain’s decline, a form of costume drama time loop so inescapable it could almost be the stuff of fantasy, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: Boris Johnson pictured in front of Clifford's tower in York while on a Vote Leave campaign
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
United Kingdom
by Adrian Bingham
Polity £12.99
THE convulsions being induced in the United Kingdom by its latest Conservative psychodrama are a timely example of the underlying theme woven throughout this book.
They are a dramatic illustration of the secular decline of a country badly failed by its political establishment, so limited in their vision they have been unable or unwilling to fashion a narrative about a collective future compelling enough to escape an omnipresent past.
The absence of that narrative, while largely survivable as the country grasped temporary lifelines to mitigate the loss of empire — Commonwealth trade, the EU, Cold War alliances — may now have created the conditions for a terminal fever to consume a prostrate patient.
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