There is a line in David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) that is so resonant that its absence is all but unimaginable: ‘To us all and to the North – where we do what we want!’ (Peace 228). In a series of short articles for Alluvium I use the malevolence and pathos of this line – a toast drunk by corrupt police officers to a chimerical space which, as Christopher …
View More Original Modern or a New Kind of Ordinary?
Democracy, Franco Moretti once declared, is not interested in the production of good novels (1987: 192). It is not self-evident that parliamentary politics should…
View More Margaret Thatcher in the 21st Century
When we remember, represent or consume the recent past, we often do so through the alluring prism of nostalgia. In Ali Smith’s short story ‘astute, fiery, luxurious’…
View More The Allure of the 1980s