Coal used to be everywhere in Britain. Without it, there would have been no foundries, no trains and no gas lamps. Just after the First World War, there were over a million miners. They exercised a powerful influence on the labour movement even, and perhaps especially, after they had left the mines. Anyone looking at strikes in Birmingham factories will come across men who had started their working lives underground in South Wales and migrated to escape unemployment... read more

If George III is Britain’s most misunderstood monarch, he is also one of the best known, thanks to Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, which served as the basis for Nicholas Hytner’s much better film adaptation (titled The Madness of King George, allegedly to reassure any Americans fearing they might have missed two prequels). A smash hit with... read more

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ said Joan Didion. Scheherazade told her husband stories in order that she might live, thus turning herself into what Maria Tatar calls ‘a storytelling transvaluation machine’. Having been cuckolded by his first wife, Sultan Shahryar resolved to marry a fresh virgin every day and enjoy with his bride a single night of pleasure before having her executed the... read more

In the summer of 2020, soldiers from China and India engaged in unarmed combat in an icy Himalayan river. Some of the men used rocks to crush their opponents’ heads and, according to one version, the Chinese pushed Indian captives off a cliff. At least twenty Indian soldiers and four Chinese were killed. For a couple of reasons, this highly newsworthy clash between two nuclear powers received scant... read more

In one sense, Isidore Isou had been predicting the events of May 1968 for nearly two decades. The Romanian-French artist and poet, founder of the avant-garde lettriste movement, had been calling for an uprising of the youth since 1949, when he and his followers plastered the Left Bank with posters declaring, ‘12,000,000 YOUTHS WILL TAKE THE STREETS TO MAKE THE LETTRISTE REVOLUTION... read more

In a daring break from precedent, Jonathan Franzen’s new novel is a hefty, fine-grained composite portrait of a somewhat unhappier than average American family at a moment of tremendous social change. There is a fair bit of exposition but important things are left unsaid. Often, a chapter opens with some brief scene-setting remarks about the weather. Large subjects – sex, drugs, rock, roll, the sanctity or otherwise of marriage, the heritability of... read more