Many of us are drawn to a life in the arts but daunted by how to balance that ambition with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. It is impossible to become an accomplished painter, composer, or novelist without spending time experimenting, making false starts, absorbing criticism, reading, talking, and moping about the house. All this time must be purchased, one way or another. Is the history of art and ideas just a history of rich kids?
The answer, of course, is no. William Carlos Williams was a family doctor. Franz Kafka was an insurance man, as were Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens. Grace Hartigan temped. James Joyce mooched off his brother; Christopher Isherwood ingratiated himself with a wealthy uncle. Virginia Woolf and Louisa May Alcott were determined to make their writing pay no matter what. And their material circumstances had an impact on all of their creative outputs.
From family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing the eternal dilemma of an artistic life.
Richard Holloway has been the archetypal ‘turbulent priest’. Having risen to be the Primus (Head) of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he abandoned religion and ecclesiastical office to fight for the rights of minorities and to write a string of best selling books, most famously Leaving Alexandria. He also became Chairman of the Scottish Arts Council.
In this, his last book, he reflects deeply on his life, most especially as a child of desperately poor parents in Dumbartonshire in Scotland. He tells the story of how he found faith but then abandoned Christian orthodoxy after leaving office as Head of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and discovered a new life as a writer, broadcaster, journalist and public intellectual.
This book opens and ends with chapters of a philosophical kind in which he explains how he lost belief in a loving God and became true to himself.
‘A compelling account of a compulsory subject … A masterpiece of compression and readability’ Daniel Finkelstein
‘A deft, clear-eyed summary of Thatcher’s life’ Rory Stewart
‘Iain Dale introduces Margaret Thatcher to a new generation and intelligently explodes some of the myths about her’ Simon Heffer
Margaret Thatcher was a woman of tremendous paradoxes: a conviction politician who was also a pragmatist; someone who delighted in her tough reputation, yet could also be emotional, and even tearful, when confronted by personal or national tragedy. Her reputation as a cabinet leader was one of being quasi-dictatorial, yet she left her ministers to get on with their jobs – far more than any of her successors ever have. She was known as a classical laissez faire liberal, yet she started out as a social conservative, and wasn’t averse to state intervention when she felt it was warranted.
Iain Dale’s sparkling short biography of Margaret Thatcher brings her to life in all her paradoxes and contradictions, and shows how her election in 1979 really was a turning point in British history. Dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’ by the Soviets, she was one of the few recent prime ministers to burnish an international reputation, fighting the Falklands war, playing a leading role in defeating Communism and winning the Cold War, and through her battles with the European Economic Community. Domestically, she ushered in a period of forty years of consensus on the limited role of the state, an industrial relations settlement and the dominance of the private sector in the economy – a settlement that is only now being seriously questioned.
A little over a decade after her death, Margaret Thatcher introduces her to new generations of readers who may not remember her premiership, but who are living with its consequences.
‘A moving, courageous voice … Muslims and others alike need to listen to him’ Observer
Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed is an imam and Koranic scholar. He is also gay.
In this memoir, he explains the journey he has taken to be both the founder of a mosque in Paris and to be openly gay, after a troubled childhood in Algeria in poverty and living with an aggressive and often violent father. Having found it impossible in that society to be both religious and true to himself, and being abandoned by a fellow school pupil with whom he was in love, he lost his faith.
Trained as an imam, though, he became an accomplished Koranic scholar. He concluded that there was nothing in the Koran that condemned same-sex attraction or committed same-sex relationships. Finally, during a pilgrimage to Mecca, he understood that he could be fully himself and practise his religion with sincerity and commitment.
The Koran and the Flesh tackles these subjects with originality and is a book of real bravery, that shows how it is possible to reconcile homosexuality and religion.
‘Compelling’ Guardian
‘Eloquent and comprehensive’ Financial Times
‘Excellent’ The Telegraph
‘Astonishing’ The Times
‘An eye-opener’ Gavin Esler
Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success. But recent events – from Germany’s dependence on Russian gas to its car industry’s delays in the race to electric – have undermined this view.
In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany’s economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The close connections between the country’s industrial and political elite have left Germany technologically behind, over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China, and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the twenty-first century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe’s most important economy.
‘Bracing, nourishing and wonderfully pro-woman’ Victoria Smith, author of Hags
‘A big-hearted, infuriating, clever and highly entertaining read, just like the woman who wrote it’ Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls
‘Personal, passionate memoir-cum-cultural commentary’ New Statesman
‘Excellent … Discursive and engaging’ Susanna Rustin, author of Sexed: A History of British Feminism
What does it mean to be a lesbian now? Has the quest for lesbian liberation stalled, and if so, why?
Part-memoir, part frontline reportage and part cultural commentary, Julie Bindel examines what defines lesbian culture, love, friendship and happiness today. She distinguishes the particular challenges facing lesbians from the very different experiences of gay men, and asks: why do lesbians so often seem to face particular hostility? Comparing past attitudes to today, she argues that lesbians continue to suffer from bigotry and discrimination because sexism and enforced gendered roles are still left unchallenged. She explores why many of the biggest assaults on lesbian freedom and wellbeing around the world now come, not just from conservatives, but also from so-called progressives, who are often antagonistic to lesbians organising and socialising autonomously.
Rooted in her own remarkable story, this personal and passionate book is both an investigation into the obstacles to lesbian flourishing, and a testament to the particular delights of being a lesbian.
‘Not since Joan Didion in her prime has a writer reported from inside inside a system gone mad with this much style, intelligence and wit … A perfect book’ Caitlin Flanagan
From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles comes an irreverent romp through the sacred spaces of the new left.
As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and a frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends – until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people.
When her colleagues suggested that asking these questions meant she was ‘on the wrong side of history,’ Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger – and funnier – than she’d expected.
In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multi-day course on ‘The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,’ following the social justice activists who run ‘Abolitionist Entertainment, LLC,’ and trying to please the New York Times‘s ‘disinformation czar,’ she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very centre of Western life.
Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber.
Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award
The ‘English’ of this novel are a particular kind of family. Their ailing patriarch is Phillip Prys, the once-famous writer unexpectedly eclipsed first by voguish Salman Rushdie, and second by a massive stroke. His third wife, Shirin, pads through their house in Hampstead, resolute in the face of Myfanwy, first spouse, who returns with all the subtlety of a stormy weather front to manage Phillip’s care. Their children, Jake and Juliet, have each retreated towards drugs and food, their already strained relationship with their father unable to bear this latest rupture. And to cap it all, it’s the hottest summer anyone can remember.
Enter Struan. Built like a heron, fresh from Scotland, he is thrust — quite literally — into the bosom of the family as Phillip’s 17-year-old nurse. He’s had experience of death, but not of London. It’s a foreign country, with foreign food and foreign customs. But it also has a kind of magic. As he comes under the influence of each Prys, his life begins to change in ways he could never have imagined. And so, in the meantime, do theirs. . .
The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse.
Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it’s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it’ s also those who preach ‘be kind’ and celebrate their ‘inclusivity.’ A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating ‘threat circle’ of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms.
Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.
‘A brilliant debut’ Guardian
1870s, the Black Country.
Michael is a miner. But it’s no life for a man.
Michael exhausts himself working two jobs, to send his son Luke to school, so he won’t have to be a miner too.
Down the pit one day, he finds a seam of gold. If he gets it out, he can save his own life, and Luke’s.
But his workmate has other ideas…
Mercia’s Take summons an England in the heat of the industrial revolution, and the lives it took to make it. Gripping, powerful and intense, it is the debut of an astonishing new talent.