Partly pre-empting my next post – which is going to start with a bit of post-dormancy navel-gazing about what I’ve been doing while I haven’t been blogging – here’s a Web site I’ve just set up:
It’s for my book More work! Less pay!, which is out very shortly. It’s coming out in a prohibitively expensive [...]
June? June?
Oh well – I’m back, probably.
What’s been happening? Looking back at the last two posts, both those papers got rejected; in one case it was more of a “revise and resubmit”, so I’m not particularly distressed. The other was more of a “hit the back wall without bouncing” rejection, which did stop me in [...]
I’ve written another paper (hence the no blogging). No prizes for guessing which area this one’s in.
Albertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. (2009), “The parties of the centre right: many oppositions, one leader”, in Newell (2009a)
Allum, F. and Allum, P. (2008), “Revisiting Naples: clientelism and organized crime”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies,13(3)
Bardi, L. (2007), “Electoral change [...]
Last night I dreamed an angel kissed me, Solpadeine…
I’ve just finished a paper. I never have much trouble writing, once I get going; my problem is always that I try to get the kitchen sink in, while also being vaguely provocative and gnomic in the manner of Debord or Garfinkel or Nils Christie. So I [...]
Following another thread in another place, here are a couple of reviews of books about Silvio Berlusconi, currently Prime Minister of Italy for the third time. As you can see, these reviews predate the 2006 elections, won by a united Left under Prodi (perhaps not quite the gran tessitore Aldo Moro was, but certainly a [...]
More news on my book. I handed over the corrected proofs this morning, together with an index. Compiling the index was easier than I’d thought it would be, but still not exactly fun; it was one of those tasks that leaves you looking round for the next chunk of mental hard labour for several days [...]
There was a curious piece in the ‘Work’ section of Saturday’s Guardian (I only read it for the problem page). It was headed
10 things we’ve learned so far
We send our reporters around the UK to see what happens in a downturn
but on inspection there were only three things that they’d learnt from their roving reporters; [...]
My book: an announcement and a question.
I’m quite excited about my book. Or should I say, my book – for lo, that’s an actual link to a page where you can, apparently, pre-order it, with free UK delivery and everything. And here’s the publisher’s page about the book, and here’s what it says there:
‘More work! [...]
Nick Cohen in Standpoint (via):
a significant part of British Islam has been caught up in a theocratic version of the faith that is anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-democratic and has difficulties with Jews, to put the case for the prosecution mildly. Needless to add, the first and foremost victims of the lure of conspiracy theory and the [...]
Those New Year music lists, in brief.
TWENTY ALBUMS OF 2008
The What?
Yeah, Right.
Oh, That… I Remember That Coming Out…
No, They’re Making These Up.
Ah, Now I Was Actually Thinking Of Getting This One.
They Were On Later, Weren’t They? Didn’t Think Much Of Them.
Bloody Hell, Are They Still Going?
Ah, No, These Are The Ones Who Were On [...]
A quick post to register a rather striking piece of news (via), which didn’t seem to get much notice in the British media. First, here’s the complete text of a piece on torture from the January 2008 Washington Monthly:
According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain [...]
Answer me this: after receiving gifts on Christmas Day, what is it that children proverbially do with them within 24 hours? Do they (a) break them or (b) give them away?
Fairly straightforward, I think you’ll agree. Now let me put to you a second and superficially unrelated question. When a man loves a woman, as [...]
(Updated Christmas Eve, after spotting a flaw in my statistical analysis. I am deeply sad.)
Now that it’s well and truly over, two things really stick in my mind about the Manchester Congestion Charge vote. (Strictly speaking, the Manchester Transport Innovation Fund vote – but I don’t think it’s a fund that we voted to reject.)
One [...]
Belatedly, a bit more Bingham. (Updated 30/11.) And a question: what, exactly, was Martin Kettle saying in this column?
What’s most remarkable about the column is that Kettle doesn’t actually contest the argument Bingham put forward. Instead, there’s a steady drip-feed of insinuations that Bingham’s speech shouldn’t be taken seriously, whatever it was he actually said [...]
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
Not a lot of blogging around here lately. There are a number of reasons for that, not all of which I’m entirely aware of, but one factor has got to be work.
Which reminds me, indirectly, of Jonathan Coe’s second novel, A touch of love. Two extracts:
Friday 4th July, 1986
‘Some years ago – I don’t know [...]
The estimable Merrick declines to do the album-for-every-year-of-your-life thing, with some compelling reasons (and some truly horrible images). I think he’s got a point about the aridity of the list format; when I did mine I seriously considered going back afterwards and writing a paragraph or two about just how wonderful some of those albums [...]
My worldview was formed in the 1970s, when (it seemed to me) there was no such thing as lifestyle: to say that personal choices mattered, were worthy of attention, was to say that the personal was political, which in turn connected those choices to a whole range of broader commitments. Because it all was connected, [...]
All RIGHT! Whoo! Are there any LEGAL THEORISTS in tonight???
OK then. (Hi Rob!)
Here are some thoughts on regulation and the law. This is a slightly abbreviated version of a paper I gave at a seminar earlier this year, which I’m planning to write up at greater length for publication.
I’d like to examine the conditions which [...]
In comments, Rob wrote:
I remember when I was at school there was much polemic in the pages of Folk Review from the likes of Dick Gaughan and Pete Bellamy about whether one could truly call singer-songwriters “folk” at all: specifically about the extent to which they were likely to be writing songs that would become [...]
