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1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000 letters@the-tls.co.uk Find us on Facebook and Twitter: @TheTLS The twenty-first century in the West is – more than any other – thus far a gendered century: occupied and preoccupied with the politics of gender, its inequalities, its collaps- ing binaries and so forth. This is no bad thing: human civilization hitherto has tended to con- sider big questions in this area – such as who should do what and for how much – rather closed. It may be unsettling to some, and cause uncertainty for others, but it seems that the time has come for attention properly to be paid to how our societies should consider the possi- bility of greater equality between the sexes. To get here, change had to begin much earlier, of course, and this year is the hundredth anniversary of women’s partial suffrage in Britain (awarded to those over the age of thirty who met property qualifications; full enfranchisement came ten years later). A significant date, often overlooked, was the summer of 1913, with the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage, which – according to Jane Robinson – was “an inspiration for Jarrow, for Greenham Common, for every women’s march that’s taken place since Trump arrived”. It was an arduous, even epic, event: pilgrims travelled on six routes from across the length and breadth of the country, some staying the course but for a distance, others continuing all the way to the capital city. It sounds like an extraordinary caravan of the committed: “they were expected to cover up to 20 miles each day, day after day, in rain as well as the full sun, holding meetings morning and evening to explain their mission. Most were on foot (perhaps unused to walking any distance at all)”. These women (with some men in support) were suffragists, rather than suffragettes, who believed in the “power of peaceful persuasion” rather than militant action. 1913 was also the year in which Emily Davidson died beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, an act of valorous self-sacrifice that has entered more firmly into the popular recollection. Indeed, the fight for suffrage is, perhaps, best seen through individual stories: Victoria Lidiard, jailed for smashing a window in the War Office, who later became the first female optometrist; Muriel Matters, who threw hundreds of leaflets from an airship during the opening of Parliament in 1909; the protester arrested for windowsmashing at Dublin Castle, who – being lefthanded – was able to throw another stone when her right hand was grabbed. Or the grandmother of a woman interviewed by Robinson, who “saved up scraps of her family’s food for a week and then, when the pilgrims passed by her village, offered them a tiny packed lunch to help them on their way. That was how she won the vote”. SA POLITICS 3 Timothy Shenk Julius Krein Zoe Williams LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6 ECONOMICS 11 David Pilling Rebecca L. Spang Hillary Rodham Clinton What Happened. Bernie Sanders Our Revolution – A future to believe in. George Monbiot Out of the Wreckage – A new politics in the age of crisis. Naomi Klein No Is Not Enough – Defeating the new shock politics. Mark Lilla The Once and Future Liberal – After identity politics Charles J. Sykes How the Right Lost Its Mind. Peter Kivisto The Trump Phenomenon – How the politics of populism won in 2016. Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman Donald Trump – The making of a world view. Joshua Green Devil’s Bargain – Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the storming of the presidency. Michael Wolff Fire and Fury – Inside the Trump White House Oliver Letwin Hearts and Minds – The battle for the Conservative Party from Thatcher to the present. Gordon Brown My Life, Our Times. Nick Tyrone Apocalypse Delayed – Why the Left is still in trouble. Mark Perryman The Corbyn Effect General Grant’s risk-taking, Conrad’s politics, Naughty Nineties, etc Lord of happy – Why economic growth may not be the only goal Lilian Fischer et al, editors Rethinking Economics. Giacomo Corneo Is Capitalism Obsolete? Samuel Bowles The Moral Economy. John Rapley Twilight of the Money Gods. Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics HISTORY & POLITICS 14 Emelyne Godfrey CARTOON FREELANCE Jane Robinson 16 Ella Baron 17 Nicholas Murray Diane Atkinson Rise Up, Women! – The remarkable lives of the suffragettes. Jane Robinson Hearts and Minds – The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote. Robert Wainright Miss Muriel Matters – The fearless suffragist who fought for equality. Margaret Ward Hanna Sheehy Skeffington – Suffragette and Sinn Féiner: Her memoirs and political writings. June Purvis Christabel Pankhurst – A biography Pilgrimage of greats – Why the march of the suffragists should be commemorated Ceiling Poetry is always upstairs – The bookshops of Hay-on-Wye ARTS 18 Stig Abell Adam Mars-Jones Mika Ross-Southall Shakespeare Julius Caesar (Bridge Theatre) Phantom Thread (Various cinemas) The Shape of Water (Various cinemas) POETRY FICTION FICTION IN BRIEF LITERATURE SOCIAL STUDIES 21 Cal Revely-Calder David Wheatley Bill Knott I Am Flying Into Myself – Selected poems, 1960–2014; Edited By Thomas Lux Tom Pickard Fiends Fell 22 Nat Segnit Sarah Crown Roz Dineen Lindsay Duguid Jim Crace The Melody Tim Pears The Wanderers Jon McGregor The Reservoir Tapes Michelle de Kretser The Life To Come 24 Tom Fleming J. C. Sutcliffe Alex Peake-Tomkinson Justin Warshaw Graeme Macrae Burnet The Accident on the A35 Sophie Divry Madame Bovary of the Suburbs Leïla Slimani Lullaby Tom Vaughan MacAulay Being Simon Haines 25 Kristen Roupenian Brian Turner, editor The Kiss – Intimacies from writers 26 Anna Katharina Schaffner Kevin Young Bunk – The rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news LITERARY CRITICISM 27 E. J. Clery James Raven MEMOIRS 29 Michael Kerrigan Terri Apter IN BRIEF 30 CLASSICS 32 John Psaropoulos FROM THE ARCHIVES 34 Jocelyn Harris Satire, Celebrity and Politics in Jane Austen Juliet Shields Nation and Migration – The making of British Atlantic literature, 1765–1835 Carla Valentine Past Mortems – Life and death behind mortuary doors Stephen Bernard Paper Cuts – A memoir Michael Rosen So They Call You Pisher! – A memoir, etc Johanna Hanink The Classical Debt My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst (TLS November 12, 1914); The Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Pankhurst (TLS February 19, 1931) NB 35 36 J. C. This week’s contributors, Crossword Pop poetry, Criticism, Letters to the Editor Cover picture © Darren Smith; p3 © Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; p7 © Carlos Barria/Reuters; p11 © Tim Graham/Getty Images; p16 © Ella Baron; p17 © Kathy deWitt/Alamy; p18 © Manuel Harlan; p19 © Laurie Sparham/Focus Features, LLC; p20 © Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures; p22 © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos; p23 (top) © Geoff du Feu/Alamy; p25 © Edd Westmacott/Alamy; p26 © Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited/Alamy; p32 © Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters; p34 © Bridgeman Images The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except a double issue in August and December by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc., 195 Anderson Avenue, Moonachie, NJ 07074-1621. Periodical postage paid at Moonachie NJ and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, P0 Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8
page 3
POLITICS Left to their own devices 3 Within hours of news outlets declaring that Donald Trump had been elected President in November 2016, #resist began circulating on Twitter. By December, a Google Doc composed by the former Democratic congressional staffer Ezra Levin had started to make its way among members of the self-described Resistance. “Indivisible: A practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda” offered twenty-three pages of advice – about what to say in a phone call to a senator’s office, where to sit in a town meeting, how to bring together like-minded resisters. One year and some $6 million in fundraising later, Indivisible has a staff of about forty in its Washington headquarters, and more than 6,000 local chapters. Indivisible is not alone. Money and volunteers have poured into organizations with names like Our Revolution, #KnockEveryDoor, Emerge America, Operation 45, Run for Something, Color of Change, Movement Match and the Pussyhat Project. One (unidentified) long-standing Democratic activist told the New York Times, “The growth in activism that these groups have both spurred and harnessed outstrips anything I have seen in decades previously”. By September 2017, over 400 Democratic House candidates had already raised more than $5,000 for their 2018 campaigns, more than four times the total among Republicans. While individual Democrats have benefited from the resistance, the party establishment has struggled to keep up. The Democratic National Committee raised almost the same amount of money in the first seven months of Trump’s term as it did during the same period of President Obama’s second term, an especially sad result for an organization that, according to the political scientist Lee Drutman, “prioritizes fund-raising at the expense of everything else”. Political engagement has skyrocketed, and Trump is more unpopular than any president at this stage of his administration in the history of polling, but the energy – and money – of the opposition has disproportionately boosted organizations outside the control of the Democratic Party elite. A new political movement is forming alongside the Democratic Party, and the relationship between the two is as yet undetermined. Among the millions who have taken part in this movement, a small but growing number describe themselves as socialists. Their chief inspiration is Bernie Sanders, who in 2016 received more votes than any other socialist in American history, and who is, according to multiple polls, the most popular elected politician in the United States today. Sanders’s most ardent support came from younger voters with no memories of the Cold War and a keen awareness of how the anaemic recovery from this century’s Great Recession has warped their lives. In poll after poll, American millennials report having a more favourable view of socialism than of capitalism. They The insoluble conflict within the Democratic Party T IMOTHY SHENK H i l l a r y R o d h a m C l i n t o n WHAT H A P P E N E D 512pp. Simon and Schuster. £20 (US $30). 978 1 4711 6694 5 B e r n i e S a n d e r s O U R R E V O L U T I O N A future to believe in 464pp. Profile. Paperback, £9.99. 978 1 78125 854 5 US: St Martin’s Press. $9.99. 978 1 250 16045 4 G e o r g e M o n b i o t O U T O F T H E WR E C K A G E A new politics for an age of crisis 224pp. Verso. £14.99 (US $24.95). 978 1 78663 288 3 N a o m i K l e i n N O I S N O T E N O U G H Defeating the new shock politics 288pp. Allen Lane. Paperback, £12.99. 978 0 241 32088 4 M a r k L i l l a T H E O N C E A N D F U T U R E L I B E R A L After identity politics 160pp. Harper. £19 (US $24.99). 978 0 06 269743 1 have their favourite podcast (Chapo Trap House), magazine (Jacobin), and emoji (a red rose, used for signalling their politics on social media). Membership in Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s leading socialist organization, has risen to 30,000 – still trivial when compared to the major parties, but almost six times its total before Trump’s election, and moving closer to the 67,000 members of the Tea Party during its height in the spring of 2010. Sanders correctly portrayed his programme as more of a twenty-first-century New Deal than a revolutionary challenge to capitalism. But if socialism has taken on a more moderate cast than in its mid-century heyday, when radicals called for democratic control of the means of production, it has provided the label for a rebellion against the chastened liberalism that has dominated the Democratic Party longer than many of Sanders’s millennial supporters have been alive. American socialists know they have company around the world. While right-wing populists reaped the initial, and largest, political gains from the financial crisis, in recent years their counterparts on the Left have been catching up: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France, and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. As populism rises, parties of the Centre Left have faltered. Last year alone witnessed the implosion of the French Socialist Party and the worst performance Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Democratic candidates debate, 2016 of Germany’s Social Democratic Party since 1932. The failures of a global elite have given rise to a global backlash – but each country has been shaped by a particular set of national challenges. In the United States, the issues that have contributed the most to the breakdown of the status quo include mounting economic inequality produced by stagnant wages for most Americans and exploding incomes for the wealthy; racial anxiety over a country that is becoming more diverse by the day; and frustration with a gridlocked political system that seems incapable of action. These issues gave rise to Trump, and they have determined the outlines of the resistance. Their combined influence has revived what could be called zero-sum politics – a sense that in the battle for scarce resources there will be winners and losers, and that nobody can afford to be on the losing side. Resisters today are occupied with a more practical question: how to get Trump out of the White House as quickly as possible. The opposition has split into two main camps. One faction insists that only the broadest possible coalition can mount an effective counterattack. The other holds that an alliance large enough to include George W. Bush and Bernie Sanders is doomed from the start. One group focuses on Trump the man, the other on Trumpism the ideology. A person can be crushed by personal attacks; an ideology can only be defeated by another ideology. This dispute over tactics has its roots in a fundamental disagreement over why resistance is necessary in the first place. Is Trump a departure from the American political tradition, or is he the predictable result of a broken system? Do the norms that prevailed before his arrival need to be restored, or did they help to bring about the current crisis? These arguments, in turn, are proxies for debates over the future. How to defeat Trump is the issue of the moment for everyone on the Left and some on the Right. But what comes next? Defeat is nothing new for the Left. The history of socialist politics in the twentieth century is one of a movement accommodating itself to the demise of its would-be saviour: a growing working class united by shared material interests and a common political identity. As the ranks of the industrial proletariat in advanced capitalist nations dwindled, radicals cast about for a new agent of revolution. Peasants, students and an inchoate global multitude were all auditioned for the role before eventually being ushered off the stage. Activists found reasons for hope in the proliferation of movements that expanded the reach of left-wing politics, including feminism, environmentalism, the nuclear freeze movement and gay liberation. But right-wing parties continued to rack up victories at the ballot box, and advances on the cultural front did not slow the opening of a yawning chasm between the richest 1 per cent and the unlucky 99. Politicians on the Left with their eyes on the next election had a grim set of calculations to make. With the promise of a working-class majority fading, they decided to look for support higher up the socio-economic scale, moderating their platforms to strengthen their appeal to the middleclass voters and wealthy donors. Democrats in the United States – the nearest substitute the country had for a major socialist party – faced the added challenge of holding together an electoral coalition that was breaking apart. In the century after the Civil War, the party’s most reliable support came from the South. As civil rights gained support among northern liberals, and African Americans became vital to winning elections for Democrats, the ties holding Martin Luther King, Jr TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

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London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000

letters@the-tls.co.uk Find us on Facebook and

Twitter: @TheTLS

The twenty-first century in the West is – more than any other – thus far a gendered century: occupied and preoccupied with the politics of gender, its inequalities, its collaps- ing binaries and so forth. This is no bad thing: human civilization hitherto has tended to con- sider big questions in this area – such as who should do what and for how much – rather closed. It may be unsettling to some, and cause uncertainty for others, but it seems that the time has come for attention properly to be paid to how our societies should consider the possi- bility of greater equality between the sexes.

To get here, change had to begin much earlier, of course, and this year is the hundredth anniversary of women’s partial suffrage in Britain (awarded to those over the age of thirty who met property qualifications; full enfranchisement came ten years later). A significant date, often overlooked, was the summer of 1913, with the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage, which – according to Jane Robinson – was “an inspiration for Jarrow, for Greenham Common, for every women’s march that’s taken place since Trump arrived”. It was an arduous, even epic, event: pilgrims travelled on six routes from across the length and breadth of the country, some staying the course but for a distance, others continuing all the way to the capital city. It sounds like an extraordinary caravan of the committed: “they were expected to cover up to 20 miles each day, day after day, in rain as well as the full sun, holding meetings morning and evening to explain their mission. Most were on foot (perhaps unused to walking any distance at all)”.

These women (with some men in support) were suffragists, rather than suffragettes, who believed in the “power of peaceful persuasion” rather than militant action. 1913 was also the year in which Emily Davidson died beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, an act of valorous self-sacrifice that has entered more firmly into the popular recollection. Indeed, the fight for suffrage is, perhaps, best seen through individual stories: Victoria Lidiard, jailed for smashing a window in the War Office, who later became the first female optometrist; Muriel Matters, who threw hundreds of leaflets from an airship during the opening of Parliament in 1909; the protester arrested for windowsmashing at Dublin Castle, who – being lefthanded – was able to throw another stone when her right hand was grabbed. Or the grandmother of a woman interviewed by Robinson, who “saved up scraps of her family’s food for a week and then, when the pilgrims passed by her village, offered them a tiny packed lunch to help them on their way. That was how she won the vote”.

SA

POLITICS

3 Timothy Shenk

Julius Krein

Zoe Williams

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6

ECONOMICS

11 David Pilling

Rebecca L. Spang

Hillary Rodham Clinton What Happened. Bernie Sanders Our Revolution – A future to believe in. George Monbiot Out of the Wreckage – A new politics in the age of crisis. Naomi Klein No Is Not Enough – Defeating the new shock politics. Mark Lilla The Once and Future Liberal – After identity politics Charles J. Sykes How the Right Lost Its Mind. Peter Kivisto The Trump Phenomenon – How the politics of populism won in 2016. Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman Donald Trump – The making of a world view. Joshua Green Devil’s Bargain – Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the storming of the presidency. Michael Wolff Fire and Fury – Inside the Trump White House Oliver Letwin Hearts and Minds – The battle for the Conservative Party from Thatcher to the present. Gordon Brown My Life, Our Times. Nick Tyrone Apocalypse Delayed – Why the Left is still in trouble. Mark Perryman The Corbyn Effect

General Grant’s risk-taking, Conrad’s politics, Naughty Nineties, etc

Lord of happy – Why economic growth may not be the only goal Lilian Fischer et al, editors Rethinking Economics. Giacomo Corneo Is Capitalism Obsolete? Samuel Bowles The Moral Economy. John Rapley Twilight of the Money Gods. Kate Raworth Doughnut Economics

HISTORY & POLITICS 14 Emelyne Godfrey

CARTOON

FREELANCE

Jane Robinson

16 Ella Baron

17 Nicholas Murray

Diane Atkinson Rise Up, Women! – The remarkable lives of the suffragettes. Jane Robinson Hearts and Minds – The untold story of the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote. Robert Wainright Miss Muriel Matters – The fearless suffragist who fought for equality. Margaret Ward Hanna Sheehy Skeffington – Suffragette and Sinn Féiner: Her memoirs and political writings. June Purvis Christabel Pankhurst – A biography Pilgrimage of greats – Why the march of the suffragists should be commemorated

Ceiling

Poetry is always upstairs – The bookshops of Hay-on-Wye

ARTS

18 Stig Abell

Adam Mars-Jones Mika Ross-Southall

Shakespeare Julius Caesar (Bridge Theatre) Phantom Thread (Various cinemas) The Shape of Water (Various cinemas)

POETRY

FICTION

FICTION IN BRIEF

LITERATURE

SOCIAL STUDIES

21 Cal Revely-Calder

David Wheatley

Bill Knott I Am Flying Into Myself – Selected poems, 1960–2014; Edited By Thomas Lux Tom Pickard Fiends Fell

22 Nat Segnit

Sarah Crown Roz Dineen Lindsay Duguid

Jim Crace The Melody Tim Pears The Wanderers Jon McGregor The Reservoir Tapes Michelle de Kretser The Life To Come

24 Tom Fleming

J. C. Sutcliffe Alex Peake-Tomkinson Justin Warshaw

Graeme Macrae Burnet The Accident on the A35 Sophie Divry Madame Bovary of the Suburbs Leïla Slimani Lullaby Tom Vaughan MacAulay Being Simon Haines

25 Kristen Roupenian

Brian Turner, editor The Kiss – Intimacies from writers

26 Anna Katharina Schaffner Kevin Young Bunk – The rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies,

post-facts, and fake news

LITERARY CRITICISM 27 E. J. Clery

James Raven

MEMOIRS

29 Michael Kerrigan

Terri Apter

IN BRIEF

30

CLASSICS

32 John Psaropoulos

FROM THE ARCHIVES 34

Jocelyn Harris Satire, Celebrity and Politics in Jane Austen Juliet Shields Nation and Migration – The making of British Atlantic literature, 1765–1835

Carla Valentine Past Mortems – Life and death behind mortuary doors Stephen Bernard Paper Cuts – A memoir

Michael Rosen So They Call You Pisher! – A memoir, etc

Johanna Hanink The Classical Debt

My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst (TLS November 12, 1914); The Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Pankhurst (TLS February 19, 1931)

NB

35

36 J. C.

This week’s contributors, Crossword

Pop poetry, Criticism, Letters to the Editor

Cover picture © Darren Smith; p3 © Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; p7 © Carlos Barria/Reuters; p11 © Tim Graham/Getty Images; p16 © Ella Baron; p17 © Kathy deWitt/Alamy; p18 © Manuel Harlan; p19 © Laurie Sparham/Focus Features, LLC; p20 © Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures; p22 © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos; p23 (top) © Geoff du Feu/Alamy; p25 © Edd Westmacott/Alamy; p26 © Artokoloro Quint Lox Limited/Alamy; p32 © Alexandros Avramidis/Reuters; p34 © Bridgeman Images The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except a double issue in August and December by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc., 195 Anderson Avenue, Moonachie, NJ 07074-1621. Periodical postage paid at Moonachie NJ and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, P0 Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

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