Browse books by title with CW new books archive feature.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Open Air (Regent's Park), London

Having seen the production and then gone back to the text, it struck me that in many ways the poetic truth of the original play is the transformative power of dreams. However, this theme was almost entirely obscured in the production.

John Osborne - A Patriot for Us

John Heilpern

Heilpern throws new light on his subject – the dream of every biographer – by means of his access to the playwright’s private notebooks, over 20 of which had survived sporadically from the 1950s until Osborne’s death in 1994.

Self Made Man - My Year Disguised as a Man

Norah Vincent

On goes the false stubble and out steps our intrepid heroine - as Ned - into the male world. But she seems unwilling to make a firm decision about whether gender has grey areas or is either starkly pink or blue. The suspicion comes to mind that she has to maintain a certain bipolarity between the sexes in order to give the book its selling-point.

British Government in Crisis

Sir Christopher Foster

This book tells a fascinating story of how a focus on targets and professionalism in the public sector has led to really bad and ineffective governance. But while Foster is strong on description, his analysis is weak and his suggestions frivolous because he is astonishingly disengaged in politics.

Civilization: a New History of the Western World

Roger Osborne

Osborne believes art’s role should be to console grief-stricken humanity for relinquishing its primeval paradise. On the contrary, a dynamic humanity would do well to sample from time to time marginal spheres of culture to have its key assumptions negated and transgressed.

The Parallax View

Slavoj Žižek

It is easy to mock Žižek for his obscurity, his obsessive interest in dissecting modish films and bad jokes, his endless repetition of previous work (whole sections copied almost verbatim) and his offensive pomposity. It is harder to convey the sheer thrill of reading this stuff.

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain

Stefan Collini

The largely unnoticed elephant on the carpet in the contemporary debate about intellectuals, which is left undisturbed by Collini, is the end of the Cold War and the demise of ideological politics.

Plato’s Children: The State We Are In

Anthony O'Hear

If this seems tough, we should be encouraged by the fact that, unlike some other commentators, O’Hear doesn’t feel that escaping from the cave that is modern Britain is an instrinsically hopeless task.

DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and

Christopher Meyer

The character that emerges from these ill-judged pages is a dubious one at best. His public school brand of anti-intellectualism, betrayed most starkly in his unquestioning acceptance of pre-emption, is his worst failing.

Unspeak™

Steven Poole

Surely, the whole notion of changing people’s minds through changing people’s language was the motivation behind the speech codes and sensitivity training that appeared in academia from the 1980s onwards. Poole is silent on PC.

Pro-Test

Demonstration in support of animal testing, Oxford, 25 February 2006

Luckily it seems the public are willing to do what the university won’t, and take a stand against the intimidation. One of the chants ran ‘No more threats, no more fear, animal testing wanted here!’ and well expressed the attitude of the marchers.

Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out Of Essex’

Iain Sinclair

Sinclair carries out his work in the guise of a kind of hard-boiled druid, both incisively sceptical and visionary. ‘The reality is democratic, anyone can play. All it requires is open eyes and stout boots. Start moving and the path reveals itself.’

The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order

David Runciman

Runciman’s originality lies in his understanding of the ways in which a longstanding dilemma of modern politics expresses itself in the current period, but his inability to integrate this into his material on the nature of the modern state pushes him into highly speculative musings on the psychology of Tony Blair.

More Stupid Gits

A short history of British Public Information Films (part two)

Many films reek of the desperation of forty years spent trying to get the message across to these idiots. But perhaps PIFs are one of the prices we pay for being relatively free. Or, as governments might see it, the price authority has to pay for letting people remain free.

‘Status Anxiety’ anxiety

Alain de Botton

The art, the philosophy, the politics, the Christianity, and the bohemia - de Botton’s solutions to status anxiety - are always brought forth in support of his case, never in opposition. Never does de Botton put down something that he disagrees with, and then disagree with it.