Ballots & Bullets

As part of its outreach work, the Centre for British Politics sponsored a tour of the exhibition I curated – Picturing Politics – for a group from Henshaws society for blind people. Since the exhibition first opened in November, I must have done over 15 tours but never one for a visually impaired group. There are obvious difficulties in …

Professor Alex Danchev…

As The Iron Lady reminds us, one of the ironies of Margaret Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister is that, while the first woman to reach Number 10, even admirers on the right, notably Ronald Reagan, claimed Thatcher to be the ‘best man in England’.

Political fiction has explored such ironies, something which I’ll be exploring in my book on …

With the Eurozone crisis remaining in full-swing, many politicians and commentators have identified the economic downtown as the main driver of rising public support for extreme right-wing parties,  such as Golden Dawn in Greece. However, writing in the Guardian, Dr Matt Goodwin outlines several reasons for why this relationship is a little more complex than conventional wisdom would have …

Given the current Eurozone crisis and economic turmoil, perhaps we are all dreaming about how to get to a utopia. Dr Lucy Sargisson brings us up to speed in 60 seconds…

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Jeremy Hunt, the UK’s Culture Secretary, remains under fire for his handling of his ‘quasi-judicial’ role in deciding whether News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s media company, could take full ownership of the broadcaster BSkyB. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, insists that the Leveson inquiry is the appropriate venue to determine the facts of the case, and no decision will be taken …

With a view to engaging students through different teaching methods, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton launched a poetry competition this semester on their core MA module “Theories and Concepts in International Relations”. After all, Roland Bleiker has himself emphasised the role of the poetic image in challenging dominant modes of thinking and practice within International Relations. With that aim in mind …

Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico’s greatest novelists – if not the greatest – has died this week aged 83. Renowned for novels such as La región mas transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962) and the epic Terra Nostra (Our Land, 1975), Carlos Fuentes’ social function continued right …

This is the fourteenth of a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls.By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of the random variation each individual survey inevitably produces. Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than noise; …

I have read and watched some rum stuff during the course of researching my still-forthcoming book on British politics and fiction.

But, as I explain in this post on my personal blog, Maurice Edelman’s historical novel Disraeli Rising (1975) – a follow-up to his Disraeli in Love (1973) – really does take the biscuit.

Steven Fielding…