How do you define or promote something as elusive as happiness? Most of us might tick the box marked “cheerful” on Wednesday morning but could well consider ourselves crashingly miserable come Sunday afternoon. And suppose we can empirically establish contentment over a longish period, how do we unpick the underlying reasons for it? A happy… Continue Reading
Author Archives: Melissa Benn
From the archive: A Class Act
He’s a good storyteller, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, and he tells a particularly good story about the Lost Missionary: a few years ago, a confused old man kept ringing the Institute of Race Relations, of which Sivanandan is the director, but nobody knew what he wanted. The caller muttered something about wanting to help people, to give… Continue Reading
There’s still a lot of work to do – but let’s hear it for the NES
There could well be at least a couple of years before another general election, certainly if the beleaguered and divided government has anything to do with it. And while Labour has committed itself to continue to campaign over the summer, there is an equally important job to do in the months and years ahead, which… Continue Reading
Brought up by a blackshirt
Just a couple of years ago, Fascist in the Family might have been greeted as no more than an interesting addition to the ever-expanding genre of family memoir: a child’s unflinching account of a wrong-headed, right-wing father set against the panoramic backdrop of the divided domestic politics and international conflagrations of the first half of… Continue Reading
Contentious claims in Tory manifesto promise
There was something almost sci-fi about the Conservative manifesto launch. A sea of cabinet ministers, packed into what looked like a cross between a cattle shed and a car park, dressed in various shades of blue, listening to the navy-clad prime minister intone on her favourite themes of this election. Strong and stable with everything,… Continue Reading
How to make the world a better place
The announcement of the general election coincides with the 50th anniversary of the May Day Manifesto. Here left thinkers and writers have their say on what a 2017 version of the famous manifesto might look like. Terry Eagleton: ‘As a 24-year-old Cambridge academic, I was lucky enough to be involved in the writing of the… Continue Reading
Women and power: what now?
In a recent lecture the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard cogently argued that public attitudes to women in power have altered frighteningly little over the centuries. Even though there has been a shift as a minority of women have climbed to positions of greater public and corporate influence over the past few decades, the hostile treatment… Continue Reading
From the archive: ‘You’re wicked, you’re insane.’
Sitting in his warmly furnished living room in Regent’s Park, in central London, Nicholas Mosley evokes an air of elegant bohemianism. A celebrated Booker-nominated novelist, winner of the 1990 Whitbread prize for his richly experimental Hopeful Monsters, he is also a skilled memoirist and has worked as a scriptwriter for the film directors Joseph Losey… Continue Reading
Why don’t more schools focus on public speaking? Discuss
It’s Monday morning and the start of a year 7 English class at Highbury Grove school, a large comprehensive in north London. The students have been played the soundtrack to a film and hands are creeping up as they are questioned about the role background music plays in setting the mood. Answers are tentative, but… Continue Reading
Sex, cycling and socialism: the revolutionary women that history forgot
Sheila Rowbotham’s latest book plunges us straight into the ferment of the 1880s in Bristol, one of the many cities in Britain set alight in the late-Victorian era by a mixture of radical liberalism, socialism and the rapid growth of trade unionism. Part political chronicle, part emotional narrative, it opens with the story of the… Continue Reading
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War PETER MANDLER, 2020 Oxford: Oxford University Press 361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145 Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense… Continue reading…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’ Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival. More information here. Continue reading…
