On the 100th anniversary of the founding of the BBC, national public broadcasters across the world are still subject to constant spurious attacks.
Tag: Britain
Futures of Postimperial Glasgow
Britain’s “Second City” profited from shipbuilding and the slave trade, but has slowly declined for decades. What should Glasgow’s future hold?
“Love and Beauty Their Prison”: Talking with Carolyn Dever on Michael Field
“The diary has challenged every category of literary analysis for me.”
B-Sides: Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel”
Agatha Christie’s “At Bertram’s Hotel” allows us to have our nostalgic cake and read it too.
COVID: The Pandemic Without Honor?
“I don’t believe there was any conspiracy inside government to kill people off,” a health official explains. “From what I saw there was no plan.”
Losing Discoveries—So Others Can Find Them
We talk of “making discoveries” as if forming them out of clay. Yet, for Samuel Johnson, discovery is an action rather than an object.
Democracy Distorted: Money and Politics
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? And if so, in what ways?
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
What Can Big Data Teach Us about Eviction?
Big data shows that those fighting eviction today need not be constrained by today’s ideas or laws of property.
B-Sides: Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train”
Strangers share a 1932 train ride from Belgium to Istanbul, a journey that reveals the dark changes already sweeping the continent.
Fathers of Empire
There is a moment early on in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies when she writes about the ways her mother Iris—as a Welsh woman—refused Englishness but still embraced Britishness. This is revealed in her mother’s dismay that ...
Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican ...
Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to ...
Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a ...
“Who Inherits?”: A Conversation between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties ...
Bake, Britannia
Eighteen years ago, in Borneo, Kelly Wiglesworth told a camera crew that she didn’t come to make friends, she came to win. This iconic moment from Survivor defined much of the nearly two decades of reality TV that would follow ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the ...
Brexit or Utopia?
Ali Smith’s Autumn, the first installment of a four-volume “seasonal quartet” that now continues with Winter, was hailed on its release as “the first great Brexit novel.” As any reader of the book knows, there ...
B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate ...