SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
The disillusion of a top BBC journalist
JOHN GREEN is disappointed by a marred critique of the British establishment by someone who was part of it
AHEAD OF THEIR TIME: Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, deputy leader Tom Watson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joins supporters as they hold up a banner at a post-Budget rally at the Bethel Convention Centre, West Bromwich in November 2017
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
RON JACOBS welcomes the translation into English of an angry cry from the place they call the periphery
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends a useful book aimed at informing activists with local examples of solidarity in action around the world
HENRY BELL is provoked by a book that looks toward, but does not fully explore the question of who gets to imagine the shapes of cities to come
Strangeland – How Britain Stopped Making Sense
Jon Sopel, Ebury Press, £22
FROM the start, I was sceptical about this book. After all, someone like Jon Sopel, who was for many years a top BBC correspondent — for eight years its man in Washington — must be completely in tune with Establishment ideology or he would not have been given such a job.
Here he takes a critical look at a country that has dramatically changed since he left it in 2014. “Returning to the UK in some ways has been disconcerting,” he writes. “It is, after all, my home; a country I love and am proud of. But either it’s changed, or I have. Maybe both. It just feels like a strange land. This book is, I suppose, about Britishness — the values that have guided us.”
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