4 h. ago A Different Kind of Power review: This political memoir is merely a warm embrace

It seems a pity that the Lib Dem leader Ed Davey nabbed the title, Why I Care, for his recent memoir, because it would have been just the thing for Jacinda Ardern’s, which is about this very subject. Instead she makes do with A Different Kind of Power — and how different hers is can be judged from the dedication, to “the criers, worriers and huggers”.

Politics

4 d. ago Sanctuary by Marina Warner review – the power of stories in an age of migration

An ambitious meditation on the ability of narrative to shape our perceptions of one another and our experience of homeMarina Warner begins this dazzlingly protean book with a distinctly mundane memory. It is the 1950s, she is a young teen, and the highlight of her week is going to the Saturday morning “flicks” with a neighbour’s slightly older daughter. One particular movie scene has stayed with her: it involves a man dressed in a vaguely historical costume who is fleeing for his life. Face contorted with terror, he makes it as far as the door of a cathedral, whereupon he knocks loudly and cries “Sanctuary!” The door opens a crack, the man slides inside, and the Saturday morning audience breaths a collective sigh of relief. Even if the plot points remain hazy – is Robin Hood somehow involved? – the underlying principle needs no explaining. The fugitive has invoked the ancient right by gaining entrance to a designated sacred space. As long as he stays put his pursuers can’t touch him...

Events

8 d. ago Live Review: Cat Power, The Barbican, London – 1st June 2025

Live Review: Cat Power, The Barbican, London – 1st June 2025  Americana UK

Politics

9 d. ago Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother’s loss

Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novelClaire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Key questions answered on Sizewell C after Reeves confirms nuclear investment

The major £16 billion investment in nuclear power comes ahead of the Government spending review.

Economics

1 week ago Spending review latest: Starmer says ‘no more dithering’ over nuclear power amid £14bn Sizewell C plan

Chancellor signs off on £14.2 billion of investment to build the new Sizewell C nuclear plant

Economics

1 week ago Nicola Sturgeon and Irvine Welsh join Edinburgh Book Festival line

The former first minister is preparing to launch a mammoth promotional tour ahead of the publication of her long-awaited political memoir.

Culture

1 week ago How Not to Be a Political Wife by Sarah Vine review – a bitter memoir of power and betrayal

She was Michael Gove’s wife and Samantha Cameron’s best friend. But then Brexit happenedPolitics is awful.If you want the digested read of Sarah Vine’s memoir on life as a Westminster WAG, that’s it: politics, she writes, is a hateful business that ruined her marriage to Michael Gove, her health and happiness. (Don’t ask what the Cameron years did to anyone else: this book is absolutely not about anyone else.) But like many a passionate hatred, this one started out as love. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern review – not your usual PM

New Zealand’s former prime minister is a refreshingly informal narrator of her remarkable rise and fallJacinda Ardern was the future, once. New Zealand’s prime minister captured the world’s imagination with her empathetic leadership, her desire to prioritise the nation’s happiness rather than just its GDP, and her bold but deeply human approach to the early stages of the pandemic (though her “zero Covid” strategy of sealing borders to keep death rates low came back to bite her). She governed differently, resigned differently – famously saying in 2023 that she just didn’t have “enough in the tank” to fight another election – and has now written a strikingly different kind of political memoir. It opens with her sitting on the toilet clutching a pregnancy test at the height of negotiations over forming a coalition government, wondering how to tell the nation that their probable new prime minister will need maternity leave.Ardern is a disarmingly likable, warm and funny narrator, a...

Politics

2 w. ago Leaked emails and fallouts with the Camerons: the biggest revelations from Sarah Vine's new political memoir

Run-ins with Jeremy Clarkson, partying in Ibiza and death threats in the post — Sarah Vine’s new memoir is full of new details about life on the frontline of politics

Politics