ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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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
[Powhusku/Creative Commons]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
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GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
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.
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