Below, a piece I wrote about eighteen months ago, for an ongoing series on normblog and which I never put up on my own site. So here it is: It is not always easy to write about a favourite book or even to understand why some works are so much more meaningful to us than… Continue Reading
Category Archives: Writings
Spoil sport
I suspect Queen Polly is right on this one. History may well judge David Miliband to have lost the leadership election at exactly this point, with Mandelson foolishly attacking Ed Miliband and Blair almost certain to come out in support of David, although I suspect Blair will be rather more subtle in his approach in… Continue Reading
The Miller’s Tale
The opening sentence of Jane Miller’s new book is stark. “I am old and I feel and look old.” In person, however, she seems anything but. As we saunter along Kings Road in London, she in her light grey Converse trainers and short black coat, I am struck by how raffishly youthful she appears. A… Continue Reading
Free Schools: not for turning.
Below, an amended version of Melissa Benn’s latest blog on the Public Finance website So it looks like only a handful of Free Schools will be opening in 2011, and some high profile projects like Toby Young’s West London Free School might be delayed for a year or two. Following on from the PR disasters… Continue Reading
Indeed they do….
‘Stop knocking comprehensives. They work’. Bloody hell. That was my first thought on discovering the author of this spirited post on comprehensives on the Guardian website. I don’t agree with everything in it but it’s such a rare genre, the pro comprehensive piece, that I have to reproduce it, even if it does come from… Continue Reading
Meet the Wife
Read Melissa Benn’s latest review, of Laura Bush’s autobiography Spoken from the Heart, published in yesterday’s Guardian Review. Continue Reading
Building Schools for the Favoured
Tomorrow, July 19th, at noon, I will be part of a contingent of Queens Park Community School (QPCS) parents and students joining a lobby organised by teachers’ unions against the government’s cuts to the Building Schools for the Future budget, QPCS itself has lost 17 million pounds but a lot of Brent schools are far… Continue Reading
The Misogynist – well, nearly but not quite…
Read Melissa Benn’s latest review: of Piers Paul Read’s The Misogynist in today’s Independent. Continue Reading
Thinking the unthinkable
Frank Field’s feckless fathers, by Melissa Benn Posted in: PF blog 11:09 am, 30 June 2010 | Melissa Benn For as long as I can remember, Frank Field has been thinking the unthinkable. Now part of David Cameron’s cost-cutting team, some old ideas are being re-cycled in a new supposedly culturally and politically sensitive form.… Continue Reading
Labour contenders give it a twirl…..
Read Melissa Benn’s latest piece on the Labour leadership contest, here, in this week’s Public Finance. 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…
