August 30, 2010 – 7:30 pm
During a recent televised debate, the five candidates for the leadership of the Labour Party were asked to name their “Labour political heroes”. Diane Abbott and Andy Burnham both chose John Smith, Tony Blair’s predecessor as party leader. Ed Balls’s implausible choice was Blair, and Ed Miliband chose the architect of [...]
I’ve done a number of interviews with writers for the New Statesman over the past year or so. Here are links to some of them.
Marshall Berman
Craig Raine
Hampton Sides
Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman and Robert Chandler
John Cornwell
Attica Locke
Alberto Manguel
Christopher Harvie
Terry Eagleton
Maggie Gee
John Lanchester
Frank Kermode
Hisham Matar
Tzvetan Todorov
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Robert Skidelsky
Slavoj Zizek
Peter Clarke
Robert Harris
A L Kennedy
Niall Ferguson
Andrew Gamble
Nicholas Mosley
Interviewed after the publication in 2006 of his previous novel The Testament of Gideon Mack, which was built around the confessions of an unbelieving son of the manse, James Robertson promised that his next work of fiction would be something “big, sprawling [and] panoramic” - nothing less, in fact, than a [...]
This review of Tom McCarthy’s new novel C appears in the latest issue of the Literary Review. (See also Stuart Evers’s interview with McCarthy in the current edition of the New Statesman.)
Interviewed in 2007 shortly before the publication of his second novel, Men In Space, Tom McCarthy declared that he was not ‘really interested in [...]
Here are links to some of my most recent pieces in the New Statesman:
An interview with Philip Pullman.
A piece about the philosophy behind the 2010 general election campaign.
A review of Jonathan Coe’s novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.
An interview with David Remnick.
A brief note on L T Hobhouse.
A profile of and interview with Rowan [...]
This review of David Mikics’s Who Was Jacques Derrida? appeared in the February edition of the Literary Review.
WHO WAS JACQUES DERRIDA: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
David Mikics
Yale University Press, £25
Review by Jonathan Derbyshire
The American philosopher Stanley Cavell once observed drily that the reputation of his French counterpart Jacques Derrida deserved a ‘finer fate than its detractors wish[ed] [...]
This review of Steve Jacobs’ cinematic adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace appeared in the December-January edition of the Literary Review.
CRIMES OF THE PAST
Disgrace
Dir Steve Jacobs
(120 mins Australia/South Africa 2008)
J M Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel takes its title from not one, but two instances of disgrace. In the first, David Lurie, a [...]
The following articles appeared in the New Statesman over the past couple of months:
A contribution to the NS’s dissection of the decade in culture.
A piece about modernism and the black American diaspora.
A profile of Iain Duncan Smith in the NS’s special Tories issue.
November 8, 2009 – 3:02 pm
This review of the new edition of George Orwell’s diaries, edited by Peter Davison, appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.
Diaries
By George Orwell
(Edited by Peter Davison)
(Harvill Secker 520pp £20)
When he reviewed Nineteen Eighty-Four for the New Statesman, V S Pritchett identified among the sources of George Orwell’s ‘material’ not just the depredations of [...]
October 17, 2009 – 5:07 pm
Over the past couple of years, David Cameron’s Tories have sailed under a flag of convenience marked “progressive conservatism”. For most commentators, the important question has been just how “progressive” this new ideological confection is. Many on the left have taken it for granted that talk of Cameronian “progress” is just that - talk - [...]