Creature of habit that I am, this month means a getaway to somewhere hot and sunny. The heat is for my better half’s arthritis, the sun is for my ageing flesh. It also means an opportunity for some light reading that can’t be done on the train for fear of ostracism. I can still remember [...]

Book Review: Sarah Clancy: Stacey and the Mechanical Bull. Lapwing Press, Belfast 2010.
Sarah Clancy is interviewed by Dave Lordan below
It’s rare enough to go come across a volume of poetry that wouldn’t render you catatonic with boredom, but Sarah Clancy’s isn’t one of those. It pokes you in the eye repeatedly and kicks you in [...]

Book Review: The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov (Allen Lane, £14.99 stg)
I started reading this book on the day the people of Tunisia’s unprecedented uprising prompted their president Zine Abedine Ben Ali to flee the country and end his twenty-three-year reign as dictator of the North African state. No sooner had Ben [...]

Book Review: What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici (Yale University Press 2010)
When a dreadful book like Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question can win a major literary award against a novel like Tom McCarthy’s C, this is a question well worth posing and not just in relation to 2010’s Booker prize winner. Think of some [...]

Book Review: Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic, Fintan O’Toole, Faber, £12.99
Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote - say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist [...]

Book Review: Europe’s Alliance with Israel - by David Cronin - PlutoPress, London and New York, 2011 ISBN: 9780745330655 - £16 in the UK
By its own account, the European Union “sees human rights as universal and indivisible. It actively promotes and defends them both within its borders and when engaging in relations with non-EU countries.” [...]

Each time I update my LibraryThing catalogue with my latest reads I feel guilty about not offering an opinion for the benefit of friends. It’s rare that anyone would actually want to read anything accumulating there unless prompted by the recommendations of others or as punishment for some ineffable crime. Even so, the odd book [...]

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by Slavoj Žižek (Verso)
Hitchcock, piece by piece, by Laurent Bouzereau (Abrams)
Alfred Hitchcock Masters of the Cinema, by Krohn (Phaidon)
Hitchcock 14-Disc Box Set (Universal Pcitures)

Like a biro that leaks into a valued item of dress, some things [...]

Book Review: In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo (PM Press, May 2010) & The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism, David Harvey (Profile Books, April 2010)
I’ve always found the economic side of Marxism to be a bit of a chore, [...]

Book Review: Gideon Levy, The Punishment of Gaza (London: Verso, 2010)
Gideon Levy is a veteran journalist and columnist with the liberal Israeli daily, Ha’aretz.  Along with Amira Hass, he is one of the few Israeli journalists - one of the few Western journalists - to take a long term interest in the Gaza Strip.  His [...]