Social history

Apparently much of the notoriety – or perhaps by now it has become allure – of Essex is my fault. In 1990, weeks before Mrs Thatcher was defenestrated, I wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph called ‘Essex Man’, in circumstances that Tim Burrows describes entirely accurately in this exceptionally well-written and intelligent book. Although the Iron Lady was about to be history, the part of England that had come to exemplify her achievement and her legacy was throbbing with capitalist energy more than ever – which motivated the profile of Essex Man and his hard work and ability to seize opportunities in a society where native ability counted for

There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores. First, to Mile End, to see the tiny Georgian building bang in the middle of the pillared façade of what used to be Wickhams and is now Tesco and Sports Direct. During Wickhams’s 1920s expansion, one neighbour, a German clockmaker called Otto Spiegelhalter, simply refused to budge, whatever the financial offer. He eventually agreed to sell his garden so that the store could expand round the back of him. But there, dwarfed by the clock tower, his two-storey house still stands, a monument to stubbornness. Next, Khan’s Bargains in Peckham

At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the front window of the In & Out – the Naval and Military Club, then in Piccadilly. Exploding, it knocked everyone off their feet, including the barman Robbins, and trashed the Long Bar. But in the silence that followed came the unwavering request of senior member Commander Vaughan Williams: ‘Another pink gin please, Robbins.’ A subsequent cartoon in the London Evening Standard depicted the scene of devastation (no one was injured or killed) with a mess-jacket-wearing member calmly wondering what the barman had put in his pink gin: ‘But I’ll have

Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’ she declares at the start of her punchy first book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. So she offers advice as well to the young women she believes have been ‘utterly failed by liberal feminism’. That’s because contemporary sexual mores have exposed them to risks, the most serious of which are linked to some men’s propensity for violence. Women, Perry argues, have in recent decades been conditioned to repress their desire for attachment. They have learned instead to behave in ways more typical of men, with their greater (on average)

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in a ‘battle over sex’. And while that has been going on, ‘another war is being waged. This one is against men, the whole damn lot of them!’ To back up this ‘war on men’ idea, Power cites, among other examples, I Hate Men, a book by the French writer Pauline Harmange in which she damns men as ‘violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly… men beat, rape and murder us’. Power’s argument is that the all-out assault on men has gone too far. The mistake, she says, is in ‘treating people as

One of Adrian Tinniswood’s recent books, The Long Weekend, is a portrait of country house life in the interwar years. Hedonistic, carefree, fuelled by an army of servants, such an existence now seems a distant dream. In this companion volume he takes the story further, looking at what happened to the country house after 1945. (By country house, he does not mean ‘The Old Rectory’ or ‘The Elms’ but something that tends to end in ‘Hall’, ‘Park’, ‘Court’ or ‘Castle’). Immediately after the war, the outlook for these splendid buildings was bleak. Some had been affected by the Depression of the early 1930s and many fell victim to the penal

Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric medium and nowadays exclusively a digital one. Or perhaps it’s not so strange at all. Television is ‘bonded to the earth’, writes Rob Young, whose roving survey of small and silver screen creativity between the 1950s and 1980s seeks to connect those airborne signals to the soil beneath our shoes. Young’s first book, the excellent Electric Eden, rummaged around the untrimmed hedgerows of the British psyche via the medium of folk-related music. The Magic Box has a similar aim. The intention is to ‘gorge on a huge cross-genre feast of

Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill near Birkenhead, in a cottage which houses the archive of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers. In a small bedroom long since surrendered to the past, she is handed a homemade CD of 90 foghorn recordings of ‘uncertain provenance’. Let’s call them Bootleg Blasts. She sits on the end of the single bed, craning her neck, ‘listening for more than what is there, listening for answers, listening for meaning’. Allan is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster with a passion for experimental music: I have had a long affair with ‘weird’

It is often said that the left does not understand human nature. Yet it is difficult to think of anything as antithetical to Homo sapiens as the notion, popularised by free marketeers during the 1980s, that people would willingly evacuate those parts of Britain where ‘market forces’ had decreed that collieries and steelworks were no longer profitable. People did not ‘get on their bikes’ — in Norman Tebbit’s notorious phrase — once industry was shut down; instead they grew resentful at a world they felt had little respect for their lives or communities. We often refer to these people as ‘left behind’ — or as the journalist and author David

Smell is the oldest sense. We owe our existence to it. The moment you start to talk about smell, things explode in a shimmering, chaotic starburst of epistemological and ontological complication. It is involuntary; we have no noselids. Smell stays switched on in our sleep: to inspire is to smell. It has a bigger ratio of genes than any system in any species. Yet it remains almost unspoken of. The existence of smell — either as verb or noun — seems a guilty secret. Mr Justice Caulfield, in Jeffrey Archer’s 1987 libel action against the Star, would have caused no comment had he suggested that Mary Archer had ‘elegance’. But

Augustine had it that ‘no one is free from sin, not even an infant’. Machiavelli deemed that humans are ‘ungrateful, fickle hypocrites’, and even the founding father John Adams, the paragon of American democracy, was sure that all men would be tyrants if they could. Thucydides, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud — all were wrong about our natures. So was William Golding, creator of Lord of the Flies, himself a child-beater* and a drunk. For a treatise on human kindness, Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind has surprisingly many villains. Here’s ‘a radical idea… a mind-bending drug… denied by religions and ideologies’, we’re told. Humans are not evil. Deep down,