By George Hoare Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, re-issued at the end of last year by Penguin, is an important book, and there are at least three reasons to read it. First, it is a deeply humane account of…

By Mark Carrigan It has now been a year and a half since the onset of the financial crisis, and the original dearth of literature on the subject has become a deluge. First came the journalists, then came the economists…

By Nicky Charlish Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are all stuff that come to mind when people talk of the counterculture. We are all used to endless television documentaries where the sixties—considered to be the age when it came…

By Dolan Cummings Western observers with no particular knowledge of Indian politics and society tend to assume the renaming of Indian cities in the 1990s was simply a belated anti-colonialist gesture. Some might even wrongly assume, as I once did,…

By Nicky Charlish We’re warned to never judge a book by its cover. But when we see one that has a design showing rows of books with authors such as Alan Bennett, Caitlin Moran, Stephen Fry, and Lionel Shriver on…

By Dave Clements Public services cannot be sustained at their current level. They are under unprecedented pressure from the global financial crisis, the slow growth of the UK’s service-based economy, and the demographic pressure of an ageing society. Consequently, there…