Category Archives: Politics
Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction
Where are we?!? Why deep South but far North? Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West? When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going? Is the North Pole a real place? Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it’s always Charlemagne.) How do we know which way is which? Jerry Brotton’s delightful new book asks and answers such questions on every page. Jerry is a Professor at Queen Mary University in London, so Tim went to compare notes on what it means to be a northerner living in the south. Jerry Brotton – … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Philosophy, Politics, Science
Tagged Books, Hiagh, Podcast, science, Tim
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Alwyn Turner – Little Englanders – Britain in the Edwardian Era
End of Empire History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn’t really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era. There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxious about anarchists and terrorists. There is the looming possibility of war. The complacency of the Conservative hegemony is shattered by the Liberal landslide of 1906, not to mention the rise of the Labour Party, and the hangover of the Boer War has raised a question unfamiliar to the … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Humour, Politics
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Cathi Unsworth – Season Of The Witch: The Book Of Goth
Margaret Thatcher and Goth Culture It was the Age of Thatcher, and beyond the playgrounds of the red-braces wide boys and the Sloane Square privileged, it was grim. Unemployment was a weapon in the class war. The Yorkshire Ripper ran riot. Bitter industrial disputes divided communities, while the police was brutally remade into a national instrument to break the miners. And maybe you remember the pop music of the time: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Wham! But there was a more intense musical response to the wretchedness of the times, more intense and more appropriate. Punk had come to a sticky end, but it inspired a new generation … Continue reading
Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success And Failure From Butler to Corbyn
Steve Richards – Atlantic Books – £10.99 Steve Richards’ last book was an entertaining and penetrating discussion of the last ten Prime Ministers (or at any rate, the last ten at the time of publication – we’ve had a couple more since then.) But as he writes in his new book, “Most routes to Number 10 are blocked.” But some of the nearly men and women are bigger and more substantial figures than the ones who made it to the top. Why did John Major become Prime Minister when Michael Heseltine did not? Why did Michael Foot lead the Labour party instead of political heavyweights like Denis Healey and Roy … Continue reading
Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics
Tagged Prime Minister, Richards, Steve, The
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Nick Wallis – The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail
Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25 It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, obliged to pay thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds “back” that they never stole in the first place. And all of this visited upon their staff by the Post Office – an institution since 1660, and one of the most trusted brands in British life. You were probably aware of the scandal as it emerged into the public arena, and you were probably shocked. But the picture is … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics
Tagged Books, Hiagh, Jail, Nick, Podcast, Post Office, postoffice, Scandal, Tim, Wallace
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Nicholas Wapshott – Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market
Nicholas Wapshott – W. w. Norton – £22.95 Not many academic economists are household names. But when I was young, Milton Friedman was. The high-priest of Monetarism and intellectual descendant of Friedrich Hayek, his theories were much admired by right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile Paul Samuelson made his mark with his bestselling economics textbook which was the standard text for decades. I used it myself at school. Nicholas Wapshott has a brilliant eye for the narrative that unlocks the subject for the general reader. In the case of Samuelson and Friedman, Wapshott’s springboard is the column in Newsweek magazine that the two economists shared, or … Continue reading
Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics
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Robb Johnson – The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child Versus The State
Robb Johnson – PM Books – £17.99 https://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_robbjohnson-thepeoplesrepublicofneverland_20210811.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
Posted in Cultural History, Politics
Tagged child, children, education, Johnson, Robb, school
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Philip Seargeant – The Art of Political Storytelling
This is the story of one man’s mission to save the world from the forces of evil. To do battle against a corrupt and self-serving enemy bent on enslaving an innocent population. In order to achieve this, he has to venture deep into hostile territory, abandoning the comfortable existence he once had, and embark on a perilous unforgiving journey. At each stage of the journey he’s assailed by fierce and unscrupulous opponents. But, at the moment of utmost crisis, he’s able to realise his true potential. Through self-belief, force of character and complete conviction in his cause he faces down the enemy in one final conflict. In doing so, he … Continue reading
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Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
Helen Lewis – Jonathan Cape £13.59 Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outlook are on display in this entertaining book. By focussing on eleven of the struggles that have got us this far in the quest for an equal society – Divorce, Education, Abortion, Safety and so on – she discusses the history, the current issues, the state of play and … Continue reading
Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to May
Steve Richards – Atlantic Books £20 You have to wonder why the office of Prime Minister is so coveted. While many politicians aspire to Number Ten, more or less all the Prime Ministers in this book spent at least some of their time in office in political Hell. And yet they typically cling on to office like grim death, and in some cases never get over its loss. Steve Richards, the most thoughtful and incisive of journalists and commentators, has written a detailed and hugely entertaining study of the nine Prime Ministers of the modern era, from Harold Wilson to Theresa May. Packed with anecdote and analysis, and unashamedly fascinated … Continue reading
Graeme Garrard – How To Think Politically
Professor James Bernard Murphy and Graeme Garrard – Bloomsbury: £10.49 In an overview of the great political thinkers of the ages, comprising thirty of the most trenchant minds in history, you would imagine that there would be room for the Sage of Hounslow. But for some reason Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant are all preferred to Tim Haigh, who doesn’t rate a chapter to himself. Go figure. “Politics”, wrote Lord Roseberry, “…is an evil-smelling bog.” It is the thesis of this brisk tour d’horizon that on the contrary, ideas matter in political discourse, and the writers pursue this notion with a kind of Plutarch’s lives of great philosophers. Highly readable, … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged Engels, Garrard, Ghandi, Graeme, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Mao Tze Tung, Marx, Plato, politically, politics, think, thinking
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Ben Burgis – Give Them An Argument: Logic For The Left
What is the purpose of debate? Is it to convince somebody, somewhere of something, or is it merely to undermine the other side and bolster your own prejudices? You may have noticed that political discourse is not always conducted in a civil and measured manner. Especially when the participants are physically removed from each other, say via journalistic writing or social media. In particular, right-wing polemicists are fond of throwing around terms like ‘libtards’, and claiming to have ‘crushed’ or ‘destroyed’ their opponents. There is an unattractive swagger to the claims of some of these people to have exclusive title to the use of logic. Ben Burgis, a philosophy PhD … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Tagged argument, ben shapiro, debate, jewish, left wing, political, politics, right wing
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Robert Kuttner – Can Democracy Survive Globalisation?
John Maynard Keynes said, “Above all, let finance be primarily national.” Keynes understood the dangers of unfettered finance, and if he’d had his way the Bretton Woods system of international controls would have been still stronger. In his new book, the distinguished journalist and commentator, Robert Kuttner, writes, “Government needs to explicitly assert its right to prevent global laissez-faire forces from undermining its capacity to devise and broker a decent social compact at home.” Kuttner’s book brilliantly sketches the construction before and after the Second World War of a system in which capitalism was effectively regulated and delivered widespread benefits, at least within the western democracies, and its dismantlement in … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics
Tagged Brexit, Democracy, Euarope, Globalisation, Grexit, politics, Trump
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Steve Richards – The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost its Way
Steve Richards has presented a series of half hour broadcasts for the BBC about British prime ministers, which he delivers as live and without a script or even notes. They are brilliantly insightful, and wonderfully fluent. With characteristic modesty, Steve says that any of us might have made these programmes, on the grounds that we all lived through those times. He is wrong. He is among our most distinguished and trenchant political journalists, and I doubt that there are six people in the country who could have made them. His new book considers the most fascinating development of recent politics – the rise of the outsider. A loss of trust and … Continue reading
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Jamie Cawley – Beliefs And The World They Created
It goes without saying that there is a difference in kind between what you “believe” and what I “know to be true”. Whether it is the True Religion (be it Judaism, Christianity or Islam), Dawkinsite scientific certainty or the Demonstrable Facts of realpolitik, we all have our cherished articles of faith, and it can be fighting talk to question the shibboleths. So you might think that Jamie Cawley is a brave man to undertake a panoramic discussion of belief as a recurring phenomenon in human societies. Between the worldwide emergence of polytheism and the contemporary creed of Environmentalism, he makes a brisk and entertaining tour of the high watermarks of belief around … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics, Religion
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Mike Jay – High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
Our noble species has a fraught relationship with intoxicants, narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. We crave their mind-altering powers, but once they become woven into the fabric of our cultures, we have to either come to terms with them, or make generally futile attempts to shun them. The range of substances is breathtaking, from the completely natural – peyote, alcohol, tobacco – to the explicitly synthetic – LSD, Ecstasy and the dazzling variety of contemporary designer drugs – but what is most striking is the ubiquity of the human embrace of the possibilities of getting out of our heads. We are a junkie species. Books about drugs are catnip to Tim, … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural History, History, Politics, Religion, Science
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Nicholas Wapshott – The Sphinx – Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II
Senator Burton K Wheeler put the question best: If the war in Europe was America’s war, why was she not fighting it? It was the vital question of its day. Should America join the European war or not? There are various approaches to history where wars are concerned. One is military history – who shot whom. Much more interesting is the political intrigue – who came out on top, and how. After the Great War, there was a strong, not to say, dominant strain of isolationism, a huge apprehension of the dangers of getting into another European war. The isolationists were a mixed bunch, comprising principled constitutionalists liberals, and American … Continue reading
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Alwyn W turner – The Last Post
No Man’s Land is already littered with books on the Great War, and there will be many more hurled into the fray, but not many of them will be as original as this thoughtful and engaging treatment by the historian Alwyn W Turner. Ostensibly a history of the bugle call that came to symbolise the honour of a military death, it ranges very much more widely, taking in all the main symbols of remembrance (all associated with the First War rather than the Second) and serves also as a history of the development of social attitudes towards the soldier, and of public opinion in locating the significance of war. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_thebookspodcast_alwynturner-thelastpost.mp3Podcast: … Continue reading
Humaira Shahid – Devotion and Defiance
Humaira Shahid might have had a gilded life, and no-one would have blamed her. She was born into the privileged classes of Pakistan, enjoyed a happy and liberal childhood, and married well into a newspaper dynasty. The important men in her life adored her and admired her and encouraged her to fulfil herself rather than take the subservient role imposed on many Pakistani women. She became an academic, teaching literature, and that might have been that. But Humaira’s personal life contained a series of heartbreaking tragedies, and as she participated in her husband’s journalistic activities, she gained a first-hand knowledge of dreadful injustice and suffering in Pakistan. Driven by a fiery … Continue reading
Gore Vidal from the archive – Palimpsest
After half a century as a great novelist and America’s finest essayist, in 1995 Gore Vidal got round to writing… well, not an autobiography, but at any rate a memoir. Why a memoir? Gore told Tim that by the age of seventy he found that he figured in hundreds of other people’s memoirs, and that from his point of view they had almost all got it wrong. Whether this was due to self-serving lapses in memory or shameless lying, Gore decided to proffer a few corrections. If this also meant indulging in a spot of high class gossip, that was OK too. He had plenty to gossip about. Vidal had … Continue reading
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Alwyn W Turner – Things Can Only Get Bitter
The writer Alwyn Turner has spotted a fascinating statistical anomaly and it is this: the generation to which he belongs has produced significantly fewer front rank politicians than those either side of it. Or indeed any generation within living memory. In fact it would be fair to say that, politically speaking, this is a lost generation. Being a social historian Alwyn was prompted to figure out why, and the answer is his ebook, Things can Only Get Bitter. He identifies the pivotal 1992 general election as the crucial event, and analyses the impact on popular culture of the disgust of a generation which turned instead to comedy, music, movies, and … Continue reading
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Nicholas Wapshott – Keynes Hayek – The Clash That Defined Modern Economics
Can government action fix a broken economy? Eighty years ago John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions. Far from being a dry and technical academic argument, it was then and is now the central division within political economy. The story of the row between these men and their followers is explosive and astonishingly bad-tempered. Bring up the subject with any politician or social scientist and they will be aware of this story. But only now has anybody written the book. There’s nothing Tim Loves more than a knock-down, drag out, punch up between intellectual heavyweights, so he met Nicholas Wapshott at his London publishers to talk … Continue reading
Posted in Biography, Cultural History, Economics, History, Politics
Tagged Economics
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Chris Mullin – A Walk-On Part: Diaries 1994-1999
Political diaries can be turgid and self-serving or they can be witty and revealing. Chris Mullins diaries are firmly in the second category. The final volume, A Walk-On Part, is brilliantly insightful, satisfyingly indiscreet, tender and tough, and marvellously resonant for today’s politics. Chris had a front-row seat on the circus that was New Labour. Tim met him at his publisher’s offices in London and talked about the historic landslide election of Labour Government in 1997, Rupert Murdoch, Lost Leaders, and why Chris had a black and white television in his London flat. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_timhaighreadsbooks_chrismullin-awalkonpart.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
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Steve Richards – Whatever It Takes
When the dust settles we will observe that more books have been written about New Labour than about any other British administration, yes, including Mrs Thatcher’s febrile season in the sun. But let the Peter Mandelsons and the Alistair Campbells and even the Tony Blairs make room: Steve Richards of The Independent has written the most incisive, authoritative and readable account yet of the implausible story of Gordon Brown and new Labour. Tim and Steve discussed Brown’s astonishing longevity at the top of British politics, and his relationship with Tony Blair, and why there is nobody else from that government worth talking about. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_timhaighreadsbooks_steverichards-whateverittakes.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
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Alwyn Turner – Crisis, What Crisis – Britain in the 1970s
Britain in the 1970’s is revisited in vivid technicolour by Alwyn Turner in his new book, “Crisis, What Crisis?”. Tim Haigh visited Alwyn at home to discuss the politics, the cultural upheavals, the t.v and the pop music of the 1970’s. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn: Coronation Street and Love Thy Neighbour, feminism and homosexuality, they ranged far and wide, agreeing to differ only on the vexed question of whether Middle Of The Road and Showaddywaddy were more important than Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_timhaighreadsbooks_alwynturner-crisiswhatcrisis.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
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Lord David Owen – In Sickness And In Power – illness in heads of government during the last 100 years
Tim Haigh visited Lord David Owen, sometimes known as Doctor Death in a previous life, to discuss his new book, “In Sickness And In Power- illness in heads of government during the last 100 years”. While Dr Owen has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, he nonetheless talked in fascinating and almost indiscreet detail about politicians, some of whom he has known, and considers whether he might have succumbed himself to ‘hubris syndrome’ if he had, as he might have expected, become Prime Minister of Great Britain. http://media.blubrry.com/timhaighreadsbooks/www.bookspodcast.com/MP3s/green-shoot_timhaighreadsbooks_lordoweninsicknessandinpower.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Embed
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