John Foster / 16 Dec 2022
Fantasy Island
Free Market: The History of an Idea, by Jacob Soll
It’s as though the 1980s never happened. For many Gen Xers like me, until the 2008 financial crisis, the free market was the only game in town.(...)
Books
John Foster / 09 Dec 2022
Return to Politics
Power and Resistance, by Yoshiyuki Sato
No stranger to hyperbole, Slavoj Žižek once described an event as a reframing of the present, “a radical change in this reality itself”.(...)
John Foster / 25 Nov 2022
Think Different
Culture from the Slums, by Jeff Hayton
Based on the flurry of academic titles about it over the last decade, punk has become as common to college curriculums as it is to the Top 40. Why this took so long is baffling.(...)
John Foster / 04 Nov 2022
Alienated by Technology
Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, by Byung Chul-Han
When talk of the “information age” first began in the 1960s, it implied optimism. Information is knowledge, of which more is better than less, generally speaking.(...)
Natalie Sarkic-Todd / 01 Nov 2022
A Story of Decline
Goodbye United Kingdom: Publisher’s Foreword
Josh White came of age under New Labour, when Britain was cool and things could only get better.(...)
John Foster / 10 Oct 2022
Surviving Fascism
Philosophy and Sociology, by Theodor Adorno
Looking back from a distance of more than half a century, 1960 appears almost as a period of calm.(...)
John Foster / 24 Sep 2022
Can’t Forget Fascism
Mussolini in Myth and Memory, by Paul Corner
If the spin is correct, Giorgia Meloni won Italy’s election already.(...)
Charlie Bertsch / 13 Jul 2022
Imagining a Different Future
Reconsidering Susan Sontag, Part II
Even as Susan Sontag’s celebrity has dimmed, the time she spent in battered Sarajevo in the 1990s, directing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot remains a touchstone in discussions of intellectual engagement.(...)
John Foster / 24 Jun 2022
The Snake in Lion Drag
Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, by Tariq Ali
Since his student days in the Oxford Union in the 1960s, Tariq Ali has been a blunt teller of truths, not unduly concerned with the feelings of those who think otherwise.(...)
The Battleground / 13 Jun 2022
End of An Era
The Battleground’s Summer Books List
“No more blood.” The graffiti has been there for as long as I can remember.(...)