DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
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Jonathan Coe - A novelist who takes politics seriously
JOHN GREEN recommends that rare thing, a British novelist who is politically aware, entertaining and who writes to the moment
CLASS STRUGGLE: In the long history of strikes at British Leyland, (L) in 1956 a striker at the Austin car works at Longbridge, Birmingham, attempts to stop a vehicle entering the factory. The strike was called by trade unions following the dismissal of 6,000 workers
JAN WOOLF is bowled over by a major retrospective for the YBA artist
LEO BOIX, ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review Night Stage, Two Women, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, and Fuze
KATHRYN JOHNSON recommends the work of Norman Kaplan that was a tool in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a bold feminist subversion of classic folktales that are ubiquitous in the Irish imagination
A novel by Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos, poetry by Mexican Ingrid Bringas, and a biography by Argentinian Mercedes Halfon
WE are living through one of the worst crises of capitalism globally, and in Britain we have consecutively experienced several of the most incompetent and callous governments in living memory. But where are the contemporary novelists tackling this rich seam of material? I don’t see any Jonathan Swifts or George Orwells, not even anyone like US authors Philip Roth or Barbara Kingsolver.
There is, however, a lone exception and that is Jonathan Coe. He is the only contemporary English novelist I know of who grapples viscerally with the political and social crisis we are experiencing.
Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1961, he has long been interested in both music and literature.
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DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family
This plundering of the archive tells us little about reality, and more about the class bias of the BBC, muses DENNIS BROE
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz