Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge University.
Rather than uncovering the dark secrets of the royal family, Prince Harry’s new book, Spare, embodies its worst traits. It’s a monument to a culture of narcissism and cruelty cultivated by a family completely unaware of the lives of ordinary people.
Last week, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her courage in interrogating France’s collective memory. Her work has been concerned with the lives of working-class women, which her books have treated with an uncommon dignity and respect.
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who died earlier this month, believed in a humanistic Marxism. Nowhere was this conviction more on display than in her writings on the sexism and cruelty of America’s for-profit health care system.
Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir, Happening, captures the violence and drama of its source material. It depicts a time when sex, for young women — without the resources of contraception and abortion — carried unfathomable consequences.
Socialists use the slogan “bread and roses” to emphasize the equal importance of pleasure and material security. In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit attempts to renew this rallying cry, but the result is a hymn to liberalism and a hollow vision of politics.
Often associated with the middle class, psychoanalysis is a means of reflecting on human suffering that should be accessible to all.