Author Archives: bernardporter2013

David Cameron’s mother has come out as a champion of the junior doctors in their quarrel with the government. At Prime Minister’s Questions today, Cameron was twitted about this. (Not by Corbyn. He refuses to get ‘personal’.) His reply: ‘Ask … Continue reading →

I listen to the radio all night. (I can’t be left alone in the dark  with my own thoughts.) I did the same when I lived in the USA. The fare there was usually crazier than on Radio 4 and … Continue reading →

It’s pretty obvious what’s going to come out of the negotiations Cameron is pursuing with our European partners just now (Friday afternoon), in the next few hours or days. Much of it is pure theatre. The negotiations are drawn out … Continue reading →

My latest Guardian review. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/19/heroic-failure-and-the-british-by-stephanie-barczewski-review

The numbers of beggars – usually Roma – in the Stockholm streets don’t seem to have diminished since Kajsa and I wrote our LRB Blog piece about them exactly a year ago: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/02/11/bernard-porter/on-stockholms-streets/. These are – I think – quite … Continue reading →

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ – For 168 years that has been the plaintive call from the little revolutionaries in the back of the socialist car as it meanders across the bewilderingly varied landscape of capitalism on its way to … Continue reading →

No complaints; I really don’t feel sore about this, just slightly perplexed. But I’m wondering why (virtually) no-one has yet reviewed my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t? It came out in October. I can’t fault the publisher, who made … Continue reading →

(From the archive. This is a review I wrote of The Strange Case of Thomas Quick. The Swedish Serial Killer and the Psychoanalyst who created him by Dan Josefsson, for the Guardian a couple of months ago. It follows on from an earlier piece Kajsa … Continue reading →