CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
Latest editorial
Market-driven ills of a sick society
Steve Andrew recommends Paul Verhaege’s study of how rising levels of mental sickness are induced by the neoliberal agenda
TONY BURKE speaks to JOEL McIVER, co-author of the biography of bluesman John Mayall
A misfit couple unhappily ever after, a dead man walking, dodgy journos, and trench art trucking
New releases from Javon Jackson, IZE Trio, and Mal Waldron Trio
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an intriguing multi-layered depiction, dominated by a stunning impersonation of Marilyn herself
EWAN CAMERON marvels at the impossible ambition, realised with dreamlike finesse of translating Italo Calvino to the stage
What About Me? The Struggle For Identity in a Market-based Society, by Paul Verhaeghe (Scribe, £12.99)
Very much in the tradition of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe’s earlier books undoubtedly owed more to the likes of Freud and Lacan than to the ideas of, say, Marx.
Yet years of working as a clinician eventually convinced him that the current tidal wave of mental illness, manifesting itself in spiralling levels of stress, anxiety and depression, owes more to contemporary changes in work and society than it does to fixed, individualistic and biological reasons.
Similar stories
SETH SANDRONSKY recommends a Marxist critique of the ‘race-first’ views of the influential black US theorist Cedric Robinson
MARTIN HALL examines the way the Roman orator took on different schools of philosophy
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity
STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old