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
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How local democracy is being taken from us
Who Stole the Town Hall? exposes the brutal neoliberal attack on councils says ANDY HEDGECOCK, and it underlines the need for socialist decentralisation serving the people, not profiteers
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
Who Stole the Town Hall? The End of Local Government As We Know It by Peter Latham (Policy Press, £12.99)
WITH startling clarity, Peter Latham exposes the moral bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the risks it poses to all of us in Who Stole the Town Hall?, which deconstructs the government’s strategy of dressing self-serving centralisation in the clothes of “localism.”
It considers too the perilous state of public services and the corrosive impact of outsourcing, with Latham’s central argument summarised in a hard-hitting introduction by Rodney Bickerstaffe, former general secretary of Unison.
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