• Book reviews

    “Like all Faustian bargains, the orgy had to end”: a review of The Precariat Charter

    by  • September 5, 2014 • Book reviews • 0 Comments

    Guy Standing’s 2011 book, The Precariat, made headlines by identifying what he called “a new dangerous class”. Marx had had the proletariat; now the most important class in the modern economy was, Standing argued, the precariat, the millions of people working in short-term, casual, precarious jobs. It was a brilliant term, and a powerful...

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    Ilustrado – Miguel Syjuco

    by  • July 1, 2010 • Book reviews, Time Out • 0 Comments

    In the Philippines, the word ‘Ilustrado’ refers to a class of native intellectuals who were nurtured by but then revolted against their Spanish colonial masters. It’s a fitting title, then, for Miguel Syjuco’s novel, which is both a dissection of his native land’s strengths and failings and an exploration of one man’s attempt to...

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    The Infinity of Lists – Umberto Eco

    by  • January 7, 2010 • Book reviews, Time Out • 0 Comments

    Why are we so obsessed with making lists? It is this question that Umberto Eco, the philosopher, medievalist and writer best-known for ‘The Name of the Rose’, sets out to answer in his latest piece of non-fiction. The result is a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, tour through two millennia of tables, lists and categories, supported...

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