GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Understanding the dialectic that is at work
A valuable tool for comprehending which way the momentum is swinging the pendulum of British politics – and why, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
NO USE FOR CONSENSUS: Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares
by Phil Tinline
Hurst, £20
CONCEALED within the pages of The Death of Consensus is a revelation that invites the reader to think about British political history not in terms of events, but processes.
While the author insists from the outset that “none of this is to suggest that history is somehow circular,” that is precisely what his analysis of the “nightmares” upon which a dominant consensus is constructed implies.
The historical logic Phil Tinline unpicks certainly feels Hegelian and, by making the continuities and ruptures explicit, each period he examines becomes a product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. He has discerned a dialectic.
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