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Spectator
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed
Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert's audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. 'It is the great issue, isn't it? The great shibboleth.' Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with 'a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings', and girls from sister schools, 'fully recovered from eating disorders'. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert's satirical touch still hits the mark about 'the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if the country needed more of them'. There is the statue on the facade of one of the colleges of 'some monocled old colonialist'. An aged don, whose reputation was established many decades earlier with an article for the London Review of Books, will probably die in college and 'get transubstantiated into a conference room or essay prize'. Edward's fellow students are ciphers. There is Youssef, his close friend, an African Muslim 'with a splash of Blue Nile' in his veins; Liberty, an activist from a well-off black family; Angelica, a privileged white liberal; and Rachel, a Jewish girl who feels herself an outsider and with whom Edward has an affair. There is little depth to any of them, but they serve their purpose. The narrative points up the patronising ways of the wealthy and the tension between Israel and Palestine. In the small world of college politics, Liberty is told that she exploits her role as a black woman surrounded by rugby players who 'bounce around like wrecking balls'. The verdict is that 'in Oxford, being black has helped; being Jewish hasn't'. The writing is full of memes, tropes, mythemes and paradigms. There are longueurs in the debate about Israel and Palestine, but valid points are made. Rachel claims that she risks a charge of anti-Semitism if she asserts: 'I suspect that killing everyone in the Occupied Territories might not be an excellent long-term strategy for Jews in Israel.' This challenging satire that declares 'Oxford is a dream' should not be missed, because today's city with its 59 EDI staff is a nightmare.
The Herald Scotland
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
James Kelman's delightfully deplorable language is f***ing necessary
So casually powerful. So f*****g unnecessary. So rhythmically right. Could have come from the mouth of a character in a novel or short story by this week's Icon. A typical James Kelman tale takes us into the foul-mouthed mind of a downtrodden proletarian. Its Glaswegian is unsparing, its language delightfully or because of this, his novel How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize for Punctuality in 1994 … with hilarious consequences. Ructions were occasioned. Strops occurred. The English language formed a picket line. So, who was this stirrer? Well, James Kelman was born on 9 June 1947 in Glasgow, a large city in western Scotland. He has spake thusly: 'My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city.' He left school at 15 to undertake a six-year printing apprenticeship. After driving buses in Govan, he began writing when he worked in London's Barbican Centre. 'I wanted to write as one of my own people,' he has declared. His first short story collection, Not Not While the Giro, was published in 1983, with 26 tales including the titular one, wherein the protagonist briefly contemplates suicide before remembering his benefit cheque is due. Kelman's first published novel was The Busconductor Hines (1984), a portrait of a man who hates his job, is bored with life, and dreams without expectation of better days. GONE TO THE DOGS ANOTHER collection, Greyhound for Breakfast, featured 47 stories, some v. short, such as the eight-line 'Leader from a Quality Newspaper', and some jolly long, such as the one involving the aforementioned canine repast, about a hopelessly unemployed man who spends his last money optimistically on a racing dog, which he cannot afford to feed. His pals laugh and he responds: 'I'll tell yous mob something: see if this f*****g dog doesn't get me the holiday money I'll eat it for my f*****g breakfast.' Blimey, at this rate, Herald stores will be running out of f*****g asterisks. Bizarrely, Greyhound won the, er, Cheltenham Prize for Literature. But, by now, it was clear that Kelman had been unduly influenced by The Good Life with Richard Briers and Penelope Keith. His 1989 novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. It tells of a week in the life of a Glaswegian school teacher afflicted by boredom, loneliness, depression, municipal gloom and sexual frustration.A London Review of Books critic judged A Disaffection 'pretty terrific', while a Times Literary Supplement reviewer said it 'can be read as a fuller orchestration of its solipsistic lament'. Solipsistic, aye. But let's cut to the stooshie proper with the English Literary Establishment. It's fair to say that, despite its poncy sounding title, How Late It Was, How Late would not make ideal beach holiday reading. In it, unemployed Glaswegian Sammy Samuleson wakes up in a police cell after a night on the swallie, only to find he's gone blind. The consequent narrative recounts his struggle against baffling bureaucracy, unhelpful doctors and cruel strangers. One American news outlet found its vernacular 'difficult for non-Scottish readers'. And, oh, the profanity! In its 400 pages, the 'common street word for sex' was used 4,000 times. This became a major issue, though not the only one, when in 1994 How Late won the Booker Prize, with Kelman the first Scot so honoured. At the ceremony, he stood out like a bottle of Buckie at Harrod's, wearing a regular suit and open-necked shirt to the glittering, televised, black tie dinner at London's Guildhall. JUDGMENT DAZE THE judging panel was divided, but Kelman won by three votes to two. One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, stormed out, denouncing the decision as 'a disgrace'. The book, she said was 'not publicly accessible' and 'frankly', she added in an ironically unsophisticated critique, 'crap'. Kelman protested: 'My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.'One executive from food distributor and sponsor Booker McConnell was overheard calling his performance 'a bloody disgrace.' Well, that was certainly food distribution for Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times, a tabloid-shaped newspaper, said Kelman had done no more than 'transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk'. He called the award 'literary vandalism' and likened Kelman to an 'illiterate savage'. Lest anyone think this a Scotland v England thing, Sam Jordison, writing some years later in the Guardian, described How Late as 'one of the best winners in the prize's history', adding: '[A]ttacks on Kelman for having the audacity to use a demotic voice, and allow his protagonist to speak and think in his own tongue, now just seem like so much snobbery.' In the New York Times, Richard Bausch said: 'Objections to the language in which this good book is couched seem to me to be so far beside the point as to be rather ridiculous.' Nevertheless, Kelman's work has been called monotonous, miserable, unpunctuated, foulmouthed, boring, tedious, narrow, minimalistic, claustrophobic and repetitive. He has also been called repetitive. So, pretty good then. READ MORE: Robert McNeil: I detest yon Romans but I dig excavating their wee fortlets RAB MCNEIL'S SCOTTISH ICONS: John Knox – the fiery preacher whose pal got burnt at the stake Rab McNeil: All this talk about celebs and their neuroses is getting on my nerves ABOUT A BOY HIS 2008 novel Kieron Smith, Boy, about a young laddie in post-war Glasgow whose family moves from a traditional tenement to a new housing scheme, was hailed as 'a masterpiece' and won both the Saltire Society's and Scottish Arts Council's books of the year. In 2010's short story collection, If It Is Your Life, wider social life is tentatively explored, with a Scottish student returning from England and talking 'properly' because, if he did not, 'people did not know what I was talking about'. On the other hand, in 'Death Is Not.', the dying narrator declares: 'Death is not, is not, isnay … death is not, it is nought. Death is not really, it isnay …' Soon to be made into a film by Walt Isnay.
Hindustan Times
29-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Doctors, teachers and junior bankers of the world, unite!
The best place to consider class consciousness in Britain today is beneath the canvas of a £283-per-night ($381) yurt at Hay Festival, a literary jamboree in Wales. Revolutionary fervour is building among those who 'glamp', as if someone had given Colonel Qaddafi a subscription to the London Review of Books. Class consciousness is a simple concept. Before an oppressed class can throw off their shackles, they must know how hard they have it. Karl Marx had workers in mind when he devised it. Increasingly those who are most aggrieved in British society are not those at the bottom but those stuck in the middle. Overtaxed by the state, underpaid by their employers and overlooked by politicians, middle-class consciousness is growing. It started with Brexit. For many in the middle class—the relatively well-off, well-educated band of voters who make up about a third of the country—this was a radicalising moment. Comfortable lives were rudely interrupted by politics. Marches against Britain's departure from the eu represented the 'id of the liberal middle classes', argues Morgan Jones in 'No Second Chances', a forthcoming book about the campaign to undo Brexit. Britain's middle class is less disparate than it seems. The banker and the bookseller have much in common. Even those in normal jobs now face high marginal-tax rates. Strangely, the Conservatives bequeathed an overly progressive tax system to Labour. Direct taxes on median earners have never been lower; those who earn even slightly above are hammered. What ails a junior banker today will haunt a teacher tomorrow. If teachers accept a proposed 4% pay rise, the salary of the median teacher will hit £51,000—shunting them into the 40% tax bracket. A tax bracket designed for the richest will soon hit a put-upon English teacher watching 'The Verb', Radio 4's poetry show, in a tent near the Welsh border. It should be no surprise that middle-class unions are now the most militant. Resident doctors—formerly called 'junior'—were offered 5.4% by the government, but the British Medical Association has called a strike ballot. It wants almost 30%. This would be its 12th strike since 2023. Labour had tried to buy goodwill by agreeing a pay rise worth 22% in 2024. It did not work. 'Bank and build' is the mantra of the middle-class Mensheviks. Before their stonking pay rise, doctors liked to point out that some young doctors earned less than a barista in Pret A Manger. It was a delicate point. Everyone likes doctors; no one likes snobs. Yet it is a grievance that afflicts an increasing number of middle-class workers. Graduate salaries are often squished in real terms while the minimum wage cranks ever higher. Cleaners and barmen enjoy better pay thanks to the state; middle-class jobs are left at the mercy of the market. The gap between a publisher on a jolly in the Welsh countryside and the person serving them gourmet macaroni cheese is shrinking. Some do not like this. The history of class in Britain is the history of status anxiety. Partly, middle-class consciousness is a defensive move. When Labour looks to raise money, broad-based tax rises are ruled out. That means niche attacks on the middle classes are in. Pension pots are a tempting target. The Treasury gazes longingly at ISAs, the tax-free saving accounts that are a tremendous bung to middle-class people. Middle England feels about ISAs the same way rural America feels about shotguns. Being ignored and, at times, abused by politicians is a new sensation for the middle classes. For decades, their wants and needs drove political debate. As recently as 2017, entire books were written about the exclusion of the working class from British politics, arguing that the middle classes had a monopoly on political attention. Brexit inverted this deal. Now every major party (except the Liberal Democrats, who speak for England's most prosperous corners) falls over itself to offer something to an imagined working-class voter. If Brexit taught anything, it was that voters in want of attention eventually throw a tantrum. Aux barricades, doc It is easy to mock the middle class. Perhaps the well-off whingeing about their tax burden, or taking to the streets because a holiday in Europe is now less convenient, is inherently ridiculous (much like spending £283 on a night in a yurt). Politicians can overlook such voters only for so long. It is hard to rule without them; they are simply too numerous to ignore. From the grumpy Remainer to the junior banker scouring Reddit for ways to cut his tax bill to the doctor on the picket line, middle-class consciousness is spreading. Few are content—least of all those in a luxury tent. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Economist
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Doctors, teachers and junior bankers of the world, unite!
The best place to consider class consciousness in Britain today is beneath the canvas of a £283-per-night ($381) yurt at Hay Festival, a literary jamboree in Wales. Revolutionary fervour is building among those who 'glamp', as if someone had given Colonel Qaddafi a subscription to the London Review of Books.
Washington Post
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A year in the life of a 60-year-old runaway (from marriage)
For the uninitiated, Nina Stibbe is a beloved and very funny British writer best known for her first book, 'Love, Nina,' a collection of letters she wrote to her sister during her stint in the 1980s working as a nanny to the children of Mary-Kay Wilmers, then the deputy editor of the London Review of Books, and the director and producer Stephen Frears. In other words, Stibbe, a keenly observant 20-year-old, had stumbled into a gold mine. That book, first published in the United States in 2014, was later turned into a BBC television series adapted by Nick Hornby. Stibbe has since gone on to write several acclaimed novels and works of nonfiction.
