CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The corrosive megalomania of UK power elites
There is a disturbing circularity about Britain’s decline, a form of costume drama time loop so inescapable it could almost be the stuff of fantasy, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: Boris Johnson pictured in front of Clifford's tower in York while on a Vote Leave campaign
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
United Kingdom
by Adrian Bingham
Polity £12.99
THE convulsions being induced in the United Kingdom by its latest Conservative psychodrama are a timely example of the underlying theme woven throughout this book.
They are a dramatic illustration of the secular decline of a country badly failed by its political establishment, so limited in their vision they have been unable or unwilling to fashion a narrative about a collective future compelling enough to escape an omnipresent past.
The absence of that narrative, while largely survivable as the country grasped temporary lifelines to mitigate the loss of empire — Commonwealth trade, the EU, Cold War alliances — may now have created the conditions for a terminal fever to consume a prostrate patient.
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