Search results for ""Author Alex Niven""

"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North." Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care An in-depth exploration of the importance of the North of England in the modern era. The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West’s most impoverished regions. By telling the story of the North in the last few decades, Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big questions at the forefront of British politics and society today, touching on live issues including the North/South divide, austerity, the impact of Brexit, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’, and calls for regional devolution. He concludes with a powerful argument for a revival of northern politics and society by way of what he calls ‘radical regionalism’. A native Northerner himself, having returned to his home city of Newcastle with his family in the last few years, Alex also includes elements of memoir and stories from his own family history to reflect some of the key arguments of his book. To what extent are the crises of the last ten years partly the result of fundamental divides and inequalities in the geography of England? How did the North become a place of lost potential and broken dreams? And what can be done to make it one of the most dynamic and forward-looking places in the world once again? Niven considers all these questions and more in this lively and highly topical book.

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"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the North." Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of Care An in-depth exploration of the importance of the North of England in the modern era. The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West’s most impoverished regions. By telling the story of the North in the last few decades, Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big questions at the forefront of British politics and society today, touching on live issues including the North/South divide, austerity, the impact of Brexit, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’, and calls for regional devolution. He concludes with a powerful argument for a revival of northern politics and society by way of what he calls ‘radical regionalism’. A native Northerner himself, having returned to his home city of Newcastle with his family in the last few years, Alex also includes elements of memoir and stories from his own family history to reflect some of the key arguments of his book. To what extent are the crises of the last ten years partly the result of fundamental divides and inequalities in the geography of England? How did the North become a place of lost potential and broken dreams? And what can be done to make it one of the most dynamic and forward-looking places in the world once again? Niven considers all these questions and more in this lively and highly topical book.

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From Orwell-reading centrists to right-wing extremists, there have been countless attempts in recent decades to reimagine the feudal nation that was once England. But there is a strong case for saying that `England' doesn't exist at all in the twenty-first century. New Model Island examines a disparate range of cultural references-the late Mark Fisher, Dylan Thomas, Alton Towers, Northumbrian activism and Catholic Marxism-as it seeks to reimagine the architecture of the British Isles in the context of the energetic socialist revival of the moment. Part utopian memoir, part elegy for the 2010s, New Model Island is an impassioned call for a new kind of dreaming about post-national identity in a post-capitalist future.

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An edition of the letters of the poet Basil Bunting (1900-1985). This is a long-awaited first selected edition of the letters of Basil Bunting, one of the major modernist poets of the twentieth century. It includes a large portion of Bunting's correspondence (around 200 letters) to recipients including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Harriet Monroe, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Ted Hughes, George Oppen, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Davie, and Tom Pickard. Following Bunting from his first encounters with major literary figures in London and Paris in the 1920s to his death in Northumberland in 1985, this selection showcases a narrative that is crucial to the history of modernism and modern poetry in English. Highlights include a long and detailed dialogue with Ezra Pound in the 1930s on political, economic, and literary subjects, a rich, ruminative exchange with the American poet Louis Zukoksfy lasting over four decades, and various accounts of the excitements and controversies of the Anglo-American poetry scene of the 60s and 70s. Whether Bunting is writing from New York at the height of the Depression, Iran in the aftermath of World War II, or the north of England during preparation of his masterpiece Briggflatts (1966), his prose is unfailingly sharp, eloquent, entertaining, and caustic. This edition contains detailed annotations of Bunting's letters, a critical introduction, glossary of names, and an editorial commentary.

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Oasis’s incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century. In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis ‘everymen’: Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping. Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as “Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.

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For David Cameron and 'Big Society' Tories, folk culture means organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness. Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about a singular 'folk' is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But what is being held in check by this consensus against the possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from folk music to football supporters' trusts, from Raoul Moat to Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a powerful force in British culture, asserting that the left must recapture this cultural territory from the far right and begin to rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up.

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