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New Statesman
6 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
From Xenobe Purvis to Jeffrey Wasserstrom: new books reviewed in short
Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens What do you do when you want to write about food in one of the world's most celebrated gastronomic capitals as an Englishman? You have to go a bit off-piste. As readers spiral inwards from the 20th to the first arrondissements of Paris, Chris Newens navigates the distinct elements of each area with a thread of earnestness and sentimentality. You would be forgiven for expecting that the cuisine that still dominates modern cooking would prevail, but Newens' dedication to representing the undiscovered parts of the city demonstrates the beautiful tapestry that has risen out of multiculturalism. Most thrilling to the Western eye is his lucid descriptions of unfamiliar wonders – Congolese malangwa, grilled fish typically reserved for 'fêtes', or meen puyabaisse, a fusion of a classic French dish with Sri Lankan flavours. From swingers' clubs to restaurants solidaires (state-funded soup kitchens that offer entrée, plat, dessert and the 'human right' of a French meal, wine), Moveable Feasts is unassuming, full of authenticity and homeliness. It is best described in the first chapter: 'Ce n'est pas un grand cru but… you should have a glass.' Profile Books, 369pp, £18.99. Buy the book By Sebastian Page The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing by Jeffrey Wasserstrom Democracy is under attack, autocracy is on the march, and those who dare to stand in the way will only be crushed. So goes the conventional narrative about the state of the world in this era of democratic decline. But the protagonists in US-based historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom's The Milk Tea Alliance refuse to be cowed by the long odds and seemingly indomitable regimes that confront their demands for freer and more democratic societies. They refuse to 'obey in advance'. The Milk Tea Alliance is a concise, engaging, and ultimately inspiring portrait of three young activists – Ye Myint Win (AKA Nickey Diamond) in Burma, Agnes Chow in Hong Kong, and Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal in Thailand – and the youth-based protest movements that have swept all three locations in the past decade. They draw inspiration from past dissidents, popular films, such as The Hunger Games, and, most importantly, each other. This does not mean they are destined to prevail in their respective struggles, but their combined stories offer a compelling testament to the power of courage, and the importance of continuing to hope against hope. Columbia Global Reports, 104pp, £12.99. Buy the book By Katie Stallard Monsieur Ozenfant's Academy by Charles Darwent Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966) is today a forgotten figure. For three and a half decades from 1936, however, the painter and writer was a key figure in the British art world. When he arrived in London from Paris, he brought with him the tenets of modernism fresh from the fountainhead. Although his ideas were already known through his book Foundations of Modern Art (1931), the opening of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in Kensington meant that forward-looking artists had access to the French avant-garde without the need to cross the Channel. Ozenfant, friend and collaborator of Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger – and co-founder of purism (a restrained and very French strain of modern art) that manifested itself in his hands as a crisply architectural form of cubism – has now been resurrected by the estimable Charles Darwent, a sage writer on midcentury art. As well as a diverting account of Ozenfant's life in Paris, London and New York, he includes his own translation of the diary entries he kept during his London sojourn that contain a mixture of picaresque views on the darkening politics of the time and his own life as a cultural emissary. Art Publishing, 236pp, £25. Buy the book By Michael Prodger The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis In the picturesque 18th-century village of Little Nettlebed the heat descends on unsuspecting residents, drying up rivers, scorching the grass and bringing with it a series of unprecedented events. Unusual sea creatures wash up on the droughty riverbed of the Thames, crows gather on the roofs of those about to die and five sisters have been seen transforming into dogs. Unsettling? Very. But the haunting narrative of Xenobe Purvis's debut novel is made even more disturbing by the fact that it's based on a real-life case of 'barking' girls in Oxfordshire recorded in the 1700s. Just below the surface of the narrative lies a penetrating social commentary, thrusting the reader into the minds of the villagers, some of whom would recall the witch trials. How will these small-town, religious people react to something they deem outside of the norm? With a level of neurosis, naturally. As the days get hotter, the patriarchal community leaders, quite literally, pick up their pitchforks. Ultimately, it is the word of the man against five eccentric girls, and through this, we see how little has changed since the 18th century. Hutchinson Heinemann, 272pp, £16.99. Buy the book By Zuzanna Lachendro [See also: David Gentleman's pensées for the novice artist] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Daily Mail
20-07-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
How many colours in a rainbow? More than 100: Think Like A Mathematician by Junaid Mubeen
Think Like A Mathematician by Junaid Mubeen (Profile Books £18.99, 352pp) Doing jigsaws with Junaid Mubeen doesn't sound like much fun. Mubeen insists on sorting the pieces according to three characteristics: colour, number of tabs (pointy bits) and size. He uses three trays – one for each size – and creates grids on them, with each row representing a colour and each column a number. His brother-in-law, with whom he does jigsaws, prefers to just fish pieces out of a messy jumble. Mubeen is a mathematician. He believes that understanding mathematical concepts will help us think more clearly about everyday issues. And he's not just talking about 'applied' maths that helps us construct bridges or check our bank statements. He means 'pure' maths, which is more abstract and usually has no obvious utility. 'Pure mathematicians often take pride in the apparent uselessness of their work, even deriding the supposed need for their subject to bring practical benefits,' Mubeen writes. ''Here's to pure mathematics', starts one toast, 'may it never be of use to anyone.'' Across ten chapters he covers topics such as 'dimensionality', 'sets', 'axioms' and 'fractals'. He's good at leading readers through unfamiliar concepts and most of it is pretty interesting stuff. For example, everyone knows that the rainbow has seven colours, right? At school, we all learned 'Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet'. But that number is arbitrary. In his chapter on 'the continuum', Mubeen points out that: 'Those colours represent specific wavelengths (in increasing order) but we could just as well reference ten colours, or a hundred, or indeed any number between the two extremes of red and violet. Isaac Newton, whose experiments led to the discovery of the visible light spectrum, attached mystical significance to the number seven, which is probably why he settled on that many markers.' This leads into a discussion about numbers that can't be accurately expressed as fractions – irrational numbers, such as pi – and then to a description of 'calculus' and, for the first time, I, a non-mathematician, felt as though I understood what the latter is. But his efforts to show how this knowledge can map on to everyday issues are less successful. The jigsaw story comes in the chapter on 'dimensionality', in which he attempts to relate the mathematical concept of spaces with many more dimensions than three to the notion that there are lots of different types of intelligence. An understanding of multi-dimensional spaces doesn't add much to the idea that intelligence is a complex attribute. Elsewhere he writes that just as the limitations of our senses mean our perception of the world is a distortion of the reality, so the sort of mathematical concepts with which we are most familiar do not truly reflect the subject. Then he compares that with the way we provide only a selective view of our lives on social media. The analogy is reasonable but we don't need an understanding of complex mathematical ideas to get the measure of Instagram. I think I might be with those who celebrate pure mathematics for its lack of applications.
Irish Times
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Michael Haag's biography of Lawrence Durrell is important and often revelatory, but it is not neutral
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-1945 Author : Michael Haag ISBN-13 : 978-1788169790 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £25 In a 1938 notebook, author Lawrence Durrell declared that a part of consciousness is lost at birth, and that 'the whole course of one's life is simply a searching for this lost fragment'. When he died in 2020, Michael Haag left behind 12 complete chapters of a biography of Durrell. A writer, historian and long-time admirer of the Durrell family and their environs, Haag seems to take the above claim as his biography's central thread. Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell – which spans the period 1912-1945, the years Haag considered to be Durrell's most important – is punctuated by loss and yearning, twin poles, Durrell believed, for 'all those who start descending the long sad river of growth'. Schooled in Kurseong, India – Durrell's father was an engineer for the North-West Railway – the 'nursery-rhyme happiness' of his childhood was interrupted by the loss of his younger sister Margery to diphtheria and the subsequent loss of his mother to alcoholism and depression (returning to the womb would become a motif across Durrell's oeuvre). READ MORE Such traumas indelibly marked Durrell; other alleged losses in this biography are spurious, fitting less with Durrell's fatalistic river of growth. Durrell had a penchant for melodrama – 'I wasn't unhappy. I made my unhappiness' – and was often the catalyst of his deprivations; his years in Alexandria lamenting the loss of first wife Nancy Myers and daughter Penelope, for example, are illuminated thanks to reference to Durrell's domestic abuse of Nancy, and his ambivalence toward Penelope: 'no news of the child either to which I was perhaps too much attached'. Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet was structured around the same story being told from numerous perspectives, is here chronicled in a similar multitudinous manner. Larry: A New Biography homes in on Durrell's various 'uncles', the great inspirations on his life and craft, functioning as antidotes to his qualms about modernity. His intellectual development is tracked fluidly. Henry Miller's influence cannot be understated. Having read Tropic of Cancer at 23, Durrell declared it 'the greatest thing written in our lifetimes'. While Joyce and DH Lawrence are bogged down in 'the morass of modern life, Miller comes out on the other side grinning'. Miller's two-finger salute to the world struck a chord with the young Durrell, who wrote The Black Book with the American in mind, a diatribe against what Durrell called the English death; the novel described a spiritual paralysis manifesting in puritanical, repressive and self-conscious behaviours Durrell believed to be particularly English, and stifling to the creative process. Haag postulates that Durrell's claim to Irishness was a means to circumvent Miller's disdain for the English. Durrell was named by George Orwell among other contributors to Miller's short-lived Booster magazine as writers who embraced the following mantra: 'The only thing to do about the world is to accept it, endure it and record it.' Durrell found another kindred spirit in Plotinus, insisting that an overarching singularity has been obscured by the West's insistence on pure rationalism, whose binaries rule out wholeness; without this, there can be 'no inclusiveness or acceptance, no true experience of love'. This is what perennially blights Durrell's characters, and Larry does well to root and demystify their sufferings. [ From the archive: Cypriot Saints and Sinners – An Irishman's Diary about St Hilarion and Lawrence Durrell Opens in new window ] Durrell's writing is infused with deus loci – spirit of place – and thus it is only right to count Alexandria among the other uncles. Posted there during the second world War as a press attache for the British embassy, Durrell took CF Cavafy and EM Forster as spiritual guides to the city in which the past and present rub shoulders. '[It] had floated away from the war,' giving it an atemporal quality. Durrell felt himself to be reliving the city as it was known by his guides, 'nothing had changed that I could discern ... the phantom city which underlay the quotidian one'. For the itinerant unable to stomach the weight of change, Alexandria was a lost fragment regained. A cursory glance at the book's title reveals, in microcosm, some of its big shortcomings. While this isn't a one-dimensional portrait of the author, Haag certainly has a preferred angle; Larry evokes a lovable cad, whose problematic behaviours Haag either skims over or defends vehemently. Accusations of abuse from wives Myers and Eve Cohen arise, though only by direct comment, and without further probing. Given the author's strident defence of Durrell elsewhere – Haag's excuses for Durrell's lies are often fanciful – it seems that neutrality was not the intention. Larry: A New Biography bends the truth slightly. Great parts of this book are reworked from Haag's Alexandria: City of Memory, and often the transitions from biography to history are far from seamless; Larry veers off on tangents, often forgetting its subject. This is an important, often revelatory text, though limited on account of the author's preferences.
Irish Times
29-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies: an excellent diagnosis but a depressing prognosis
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost its Mind. Author : Dan Davies ISBN-13 : 978-1788169547 Publisher : Profile Books Guideline Price : £22 In this informative and ambitious book, Dan Davies looks at contemporary systems. He looks at economics, airlines, banks and corporations and posits that recent fiascos (the 2008 financial crash; Brexit; the rise of populism) are not the result of 'conspiracy or cock-up' but of the growing complexity of these systems. Within these systems the idea of individual decision-making is redundant because the decisions are inscribed within the system itself, which produces its own results, independent of the individuals within the systems. This may initially seem like a plea bargain and excuse for those involved in nefarious activities, but ultimately the book is an indictment of the organisation and management of these systems within a neo-liberal environment. He introduces the term 'accountability sinks' where no person has agency therefore no one is responsible. He examines specific examples: Fox News reporting of voter fraud; airline flight experiences; squirrels getting shredded at Schiphol airport. READ MORE We all know the Ryanair experience where we have a problem but the person we engage with offers the interaction of a recorded message machine. For the system to function, 'it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system.' This last point he sees as a primary reason why many have abandoned mainstream politics and embraced Trump and populist politics. He identifies three main revolutions that have got us here: the managerial revolution, where control was passed over from owners and capitalists to professional administrators; the 1970s neo-liberal revolution which has shaped our current society; and the aborted cybernetic revolution. [ The Irish Times view on the Ryanair wheelie case controversy: making a bags of it Opens in new window ] He explores cybernetics ('the study of decision-making systems') through the eccentric, leftist Stafford Beer. Beer held meetings that were 'unstructured, informal connections between staff at different levels and performing different functions'. He wanted to create systems that were open, as opposed to closed systems – such as banking, where a limited focus on profit ended up with an implosion that led to them being bailed out by governments: the socialisation of private debt. Cybernetically speaking, there was not enough variety in the controlling system that would have provided feedback that the system was unstable and needed readjustment. There was no feedback channel beyond the closed system with regard to wider society. This is in keeping with Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics (the home of neo-liberal economics), which rejected a consideration of society. This was best expressed in Margaret Thatcher 's famous claim that there is no such thing as society. She, along with Ronald Reagan , was one of the two main political enforcers of this ideology. The closed neo-liberal system has led to the insanity where people still chase profit at the expense of planetary destruction. In cybernetic terms, it's the problem of emphasising one outcome of maximisation to the detriment of others. 'Every decision-making system set up as a maximiser needs to have a higher-level system watching over it.' Davis looks at the technical aspects and details of cybernetics, which are well explained yet require an extra level of concentration if, like me, you are not familiar with it. He claims that cybernetics could have changed the way economics developed in the 1950s and 1960s, instead of creating a system that supported the neo-liberal agenda. This agenda produced models of the world which neglected so many variables that they became self-fulfilling prophecies in their results: they were models of wish fulfilment posing as science. As Stafford Beer has it: 'Where analysis fails, ideology steps in.' That ideology was neo-liberalism. The strength of this book is its ability to provide an overarching theory of why the world is in crisis and how economic and societal development has lead to this. The book wraps up by reiterating that nobody in a corporation was or is responsible. This seems to me to let too many people off the hook. What about whistleblowers? There are always people doing the right thing. Davis, though, would argue that the systems were set up without the channels for this information to reach the ears of those in power. The profit motive is amplified as information within the system to the detriment of all other information/inputs. He ends by saying that, as systems get more complicated, we need to become use to more accountability sinks: '...we cannot afford the luxury of explainability; we can't keep on demanding that an identifiable human being is available to blame when things go wrong.' So morality is out the window. Our human status declines as he sees 'the death of responsibility' coming, and that 'I blame the system is something we will have to get used to saying, and meaning it literally'. An excellent diagnosis but a depressing prognosis. Highly recommended.
WIRED
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
This Weird, Fleshy Novel Is Exactly What You Need Right Now
Feb 5, 2025 1:12 PM Dengue Boy , a book about a humanoid mosquito taking his revenge in the dying years of planet Earth is unsettling and essential. Photo-Illustration:If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Evolution, ethnography, epidemics—this is the soup from which Dengue Boy , a brilliantly strange new novel by the Argentine author Michel Nieva, emerges. The eponymous Dengue Boy is a mosquito–human hybrid who might be an experiment, a genetic mutant, or the result of some terrible corporate crime. He might be all three at once. In any case, it doesn't matter much to the monstrous creature, whom we find living in 2272 in what remains of Argentina after the melting of the Antarctic ice cap has rendered most of the world either underwater or uninhabitably hot. Hot enough to roast a turkey in 20 minutes flat at what passes for room temperature in California. The 'Argentine Caribbean,' meanwhile, remains a comparatively balmy year-round average of 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). It is little surprise, then, that developers have been busy terraforming the Antarctic Caribbean, engineering whole biomes to recreate little slices of Earth on, uh, Earth. For a flat fee, clients can choose packages of five, 10, or 20 species to populate their biome en masse. Who cares about one Amazon rainforest when you can make 30? Courtesy of Profile Books Buy this book at: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Humanity is hanging on, more or less, like a bug on the underside of rock. On the other side of the rock are the privileged children of the viroeconomy (more on that later). These kids plug themselves into virtual headsets and immerse themselves in conquest fantasies like the game Christians v Indians 2. One character fantasizes about getting hold of sheepies: near-sentient fleshlights with endless orifices to explore. Some have whole cupboards full of the things. I mention the sheepies not to be prurient, but because they get something across about the strangeness of Dengue Boy . It's all very fleshy. Heads splitting, tentacles plunging, innards becoming outards—the book is a riot of bodily sensations. One might call the book 'climate fiction,' in that it is set in a world clearly in the death spiral of climate catastrophe, but this would undersell the novel's heady weirdness, which skips across economics, sexuality, biology, and temporality without ever really drawing breath. Any novel in which the protagonist finds themselves in an insect body draws the inevitable comparison to The Metamorphosis . The book's inside flap describes Dengue Boy as an 'extraordinary, Kafkaesque portrait of a demented future.' But in Kafka's novella, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous bug; his immense pain comes from his knowledge of what he once was, and the life he would like to crawl back to. Dengue Boy was always Dengue Boy. He has no transformation with which he must come to terms. It is the outside world that must be brought to know him. 'Where his mother would have liked to see pudgy arms, his wings sprouted out, their nerve endings like the varicose veins of a disgusting old man, and where his mother would have liked to hear chuckles and adorable yelps, there was only a constant, maddening buzz that would drive even the most tranquil soul to despair.' In The Metamorphosis , Gregor Samsa's transformation is a one-way street. But Dengue Boy will go through a whirlwind of changes, like evolution working in fastforward, until it's not clear exactly where time or fact or fiction begin or end. In Dengue Boy the billionaire class are not tech bros, but speculators on the so-called viroeconomy, who bet on which disease is about to take off and make a killing stockpiling would-be cures. Along with the developers who build resorts on the ground ceded by retreating ice caps, they are the only real winners in the disaster economy. It takes a certain kind of person to see a landscape riven by destruction and see an opportunity for luxury condos. Which all sounds a bit depressing, except Nieva's visceral, surreal prose—translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery—is anything but. This is a book that takes the awful strangeness of the world and it explodes it into something that is both terrible and impossible to look away from. It reminded me of the final scene of the movie Pearl , in which Mia Goth faces the camera with a rictus grin that drags on and on, until she is sobbing, slowly unravelling into a grimace of deep despair while the end credits play out. Dengue Boy plays this trick in reverse. It is a grimace that turns into a grin. It is a camera shot that spins around so many times that you're not sure if it's the director or the actor you're looking at, and in any case you feel queasy or are you just giddy with excitement? It is weirdness sliced up, spun in a salad spinner and served with some indescribable gunk on top. It's delicious, if you can stomach it.
