What we lost last summer

It’s startling to read about extremely recent news events in a book presented as a novel. In Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn uses the McCanns, the floods, the foiled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Blair’s farewell and Brown’s hello as the meat of his narrative. Although this isn’t a conventional novel, in that the narrator appears to be Gordon Burn (addressing himself as ‘he’) and his ‘journey’ consists merely of reflecting on last summer’s major news stories and conducting the occasional interview, its approach to the news is nevertheless novelistic. It’s as if you’re reading a secret Sunday supplement which reports the news not as reality, but as components of a fictive world. The suggestion, of course, is that a fictive world is exactly what contemporary media presents, and we, as round-the-clock news consumers whether we like it or not, are co-opted by it.

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Iain Mansfield

Bridget Phillipson wants no alternatives to expose her education mistakes

This isn’t a new idea — it’s at least as old as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967): ‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,’ he wrote, with particular reference to the effect of mass media.