STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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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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TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
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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