The former world bank economist argues that neoliberalism paves the way for populismIn 1944 the Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, displaced to Britain, was disquieted by his leftwing academic peers. As Hayek saw it, their political philosophy committed the same error as the fascism that was ravaging his homeland. He wrote that the desire to plan...

What do the careers of Diane Abbott, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell tell us about political success?“Persistence,” writes Andy Beckett, “is one of the left’s qualities that its enemies like least.” These hair-shirted zealots spend countless hours meeting, rallying, consciousness-raising, drumming up meagre support for seemingly...

The precarity and dreams of thirtysomething Londoners are adroitly explored in this tender portrait of contemporary queer lifeLondon has long been both literary character and setting, showing its many different faces in fiction from Oliver Twist to Mrs Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s NW to Andrew O’Hagan’s newly published Caledonian Road. Now Evenings and Weekends,...

Vibrant essays from the author of The Argonauts touch on art, inspiration, and many of the central dilemmas of our times“As a child I had so much energy I’d lie awake and feel my organs smolder,” Maggie Nelson wrote in 2005’s Jane: A Murder. She was a dancer before she was a writer and you can feel the commitment to the fire of bodily motion in her...

Audiobooks are fast becoming ‘a major route to market for consumers of books’, the trade body saysThe number of UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% between 2022 and 2023, according to new data from the Publishers Association (PA).Revenue from audiobooks rose 24% across the same period to £206m in 2023, reflecting an increase in the number of audiobook...

The British poet’s second collection is an exacting examination of the past, the present and an uncertain futurePoetry is a form of scrutiny, an inquiry that, when it succeeds, advances further than it is possible to go in prose. Rowland Bagnall’s attractively questing second collection is an investigation of consciousness. Like Virginia Woolf, he records...