Modern Man Made Flesh

‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the murder at road hill house’ by Kate Summerscale; Bloomsbury, 2009. 400pp Reviewed by Sarah Boyes | 01 November 2009 June, 1842. A small detective division is created in the London Met, by special permission of the Home Office. Camberwell’s Jack Whicher is one of a small group of new detectives, on a salary of £73 a year, who is allowed to shed the traditional bobby’s blue and wear plain...

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THEATRE: A New World

‘A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine’ by Trevor Griffiths, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London. September 2009 Reviewed by Thomas Gartrell | 25 September 2009 In 1791, Tom Paine began the Rights of Man – his defence of the ongoing French Revolution – with an address to George Washington, the first President of the newly founded United States of America. Paine presents him with “a defence of those Principles of...

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Nudging: The very Antithesis of Choice

‘Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness’ by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; Penguin, 2008. 224pp Reviewed by Martyn Perks | 19 December 2008 Organ donation is a contentious issue. As it stands in the UK, losing a close relative can suddenly mean a difficult decision on whether or not to donate their organs, especially if they did not indicate any prior consent. There are moves towards...

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More than Bricks and Mortar

Dave Clements | November 2007 In a speech given at Battle of Ideas 2007, Dave Clements argues that housing has become a vehicle for contemporary prejudices, anxieties and orthodoxies about how we live.  The figures … The government’s plan is to build three million homes by 2020 The annual target is to build 200,000 homes a year We are already falling short by around 30,000 a year The target will increase to 240,000 a year from 2016...

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ESSAY: The political engagement’s off

Austin Williams | October 2007 The e:petitions web page was launched on Number 10’s website in November 2006 ‘enabling anyone to address and deliver a petition directly to the Prime Minister.’ Presumably, someone thought that it would be a good wheeze to minimise the photo opportunities for aggreived members of the public to present a paper petition to the Prime Minister in full view of the waiting media. Oh well, back to the drawing...

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ESSAY: Eating the greens

Austin Williams | July 2007 Tony Juniper, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth told a Local Groups conference in September 2006 that ‘environmentalists have had a reputation for being against change’. He went on to say that ‘this reputation, whether accurate or not, has enabled some of those who we seek to influence, to present us as a backward looking and conservative force.’ God forbid. But Friends of the Earth aside, the...

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Something Stinks

Austin Williams | 28 February 2007 I’ve just finished reading Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” about London’s 19th C cholera epidemics. Until Dr John Snow located the source of the problem in the water supply, everyone believed that the killer disease has something to do with the all-pervasive stench of the city; the ‘miasma’ permeating the over-crowded slums of the city. Using painstaking empirical data backed up by meticulous...

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Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

Peter Smith | 15 February 2007 Did you give flowers on Valentine’s Day? Planning to give Easter eggs next month? (Maybe eat them if not give them?) Be warned: celebrations and vacations are increasingly the environmental campaigner’s hook to lecture us on our bad habits.  Noting that cut flowers for Valentine’s bouquets are increasingly imported to the UK, green campaigners have voiced concern over ‘flower miles’ applying the...

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Building Esteem or Housing Discontent

Dave Clements | 27 February 2007 The government’s obsession with child poverty has always struck me as a little strange. I don’t mean to pretend it doesn’t exist. But why child poverty? Why not address poverty itself? Children are only poor because their parents are poor surely, not because they are poor parents. Perhaps by foregrounding the vulnerable child, awkward questions about how people can be so poor today in an otherwise more...

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Rod Eddington’s unedifying proposals

Austin Williams | 16 December 2006 Rod Eddington’s transport study is the latest in the long line of Treasury-driven policy initiatives designed to counter the lack of political certainty in government circles. While ministers are noticeable by their absence in real transport debates, refusing to discuss any clear initiative for fear that it might turn around and bite them on the bumper, it is much easier to have a third party do it...

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