MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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A lot to answer for
FIONA O’CONNOR admires a collection that is a riposte to the armies of developers, estate agents, private capital speculators and their marketeers
The four new tower blocks built around Deansgate Square dominate the skyline. Their 21st century design contrasting with the nineteenth century architecture of the Knott Mill (now Deansgate) Station (a Grade II listed building).
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
The Book Of Manchester: A City In Short Fiction
Edited by David Sue, Comma Press, £10.99
“A few stops before town she came down with her nose in her handbag, after a cig. She got off and stayed at the stop awhile, cupping her hands to light up. When she crossed he leapt off at the last second and followed her to Hulme, keeping her well ahead. Between them were bikes, prams, old biddies hunched in saris bobbing into the greengrocers, skinny Jamaicans leaning outside a café... A line of big lads gave him f***off stares and he walked in the road to get by.”
Tom Benn’s description of an obsessive son following his mother into her secret life pulls focus on a city teeming with stories.
It is one of a dozen pieces on the great northern metropolis brought together in this compendium from Comma Press. With its back-story of gothic ambition, industrialised slavery to dark Satanic mills, protest movements and insurgent music scene, Manchester arrives ready-branded for the imagination. Updating the story, twelve writers conjure contemporary life against a backdrop of poverty, crime and excess.
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FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
FIONA O’CONNOR recommends an accessible and entertaining survey of post-war French philosophy and its relation to contemporary capitalism
FIONA O’CONNOR examines a new book by Labour’s media-savvy MP and new Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls
