David Collard
Lengthening Shadows
Although the title carries a whiff of hipness (it’s a song by the Manchester band Happy Mondays – the author once worked for New Musical Express), an unhipper collection than Wrote for Luck is impossible to imagine. This book is a field guide to an endangered species: the cultivated liberal middle classes, the kind of folk who used to write and read about themselves in stories that appeared in now-defunct magazines such as The Listener or the heftier broadsheets; a leisured, educated, privileged readership that no longer possesses the social and cultural clout it once assumed as its birthright.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties