Jen Harvie, “Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism” (Palgrave, 2013)
Arts and culture are under threat in the age of austerity. This threat is underpinned by the misuse of the idea of participation in contemporary performance. This is one of the central arguments of Fa...
9 Feb 201540min
Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, “The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire” (Verso, 2013)
Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Pol...
9 Feb 20151h 7min
Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enligh...
2 Feb 201547min
Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whi...
16 Jan 20151h 3min
Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014)
How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) cha...
19 Dec 201454min
Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollop...
12 Dec 20141h 2min
Beth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)
It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth...
3 Dec 201441min
Sam Friedman, “Comedy and Distinction” (Routledge, 2014)
What is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultu...
21 Nov 201447min
