CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Class exercise
JOHN GREEN recommends an entertaining, if harsh and instructive, study of bullying, discipline and power dynamics in schools and at work
LABORATORY OF BULLYING: A scene from Ken Loach's Kes
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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
A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons
Jonathan Taylor, Goldsmiths Press, £23
THIS is an unusual memoir-cum-educational treatise, examining bullying and power dynamics in schools and at work, both at an institutional and individual level, as experienced by the author. He relates first-hand the different forms bullying takes throughout his childhood into adulthood and what it reveals about the culture and society we live in.
Taylor says of this book: “I want to explore the hall of mirrors that is criticism and autobiography... I want to explore the uses and abuses of educational power from a subjective, rather than pseudo-objective, perspective.”
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