Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous - Softcover

Cohen, Nick

3.44

27 ratings by Goodreads

9781859842881: Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859842887 ISBN 13: 9781859842881

Publisher: Verso Books, 2000

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While the rest of the media lounge in the warm glow of New Labour's rosy dawn, one journalist in Britain has been a consistently sharp and witty scourge of Tony Blair and his bandwagon babes. Step forward Nick Cohen, denizen of the Observer newspaper's celebrated 'Hold on a Minute' column and a writer who has regularly identified Labour's Third Way as the mid-point between truth and lies, decency and hypocrisy, honesty and corruption. Whether he is tearing into Labour's plans to privatize the prison system and introduce curfews for teenagers, or detailing the government's cozying up to Rupert Murdoch and the hot money traders in the City, Cohen maintains a peerless grasp on the power that flows from fusing invective with scrupulous investigation. Even Downing Street Policy Advisor Andrew Adonis was forced to concede that 'no one is better at getting under the Government's skin'. A coruscating barrage of dispatches from his sniper's post, Cruel Britannia celebrates Cohen's lonely stand. It will revivify the disillusioned who anticipated something better from Labour's ascent and fortify those on the left who expected little and received precisely that.

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Review:

For some time past Nick Cohen has been, for all intents and purposes, the sole exponent of Her Majesty's loyal opposition. With a rump Conservative minority more intent on internal battles and a left wing smothered by the New Labour media machine, Cohen has been almost alone as a critic of the Blair regime. Like the little boy calling out about the Emperor's new clothes, he has been one of the most consistent and forthright opponents of New Labour.

Cruel Britannia is a collection of Cohen's writings in the Observer, London Review of Books, New Statesman and the Jewish Quarterly. Collected together and embellished by revision and more recent additions, this book comprises a serious indictment of the UK government and confirms Cohen as the strongest and most convincing voice from the left in recent years. Taken together these essays and articles cover nearly every possible area of policy and throughout the writing is incisive and the criticism thorough and thoughtful. As the Cassandra of his time, Cohen deserves to be read and re-read by all people who have an interest in the development of British and European politics. --Douglas Pretsell

Review:

"If I listened to Nick Cohen I would never win an election." -- Tony Blair "A superb journalist... some of the most compelling writing to be published during the age of Blair." - Roy Hattersley, Guardian "Sharp and Punchy... A shining example of how to take on the establishment. How New Labour must hate him." - Glasgow Herald "Cohen is a spin doctor's nightmare, wittily exposing all that is callous, hypocritical and vapid in the new politics ... [he] is one journalist who will never be bought, although the Conservatives could use his skills." - Financial Times 'To read Cruel Britannia is like swallowing a useful pill to purge optimism ... Cohen is a paid-up dissensus man." - Times Literary Supplement "Nick Cohen smell out the cesspits of corruption and injustice with the keenest of noses. He tells it as it is, without fear or favour. He's one of the few independent voices left in an increasingly closed society." - Harold Pinter "Cohen is his own man, not always consistent or right or coherent, but unspinnable and unignorable, a Cassandra at the court of a king whose control freakery might yet be his undoing." - Scotland on Sunday

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