Book Reviews

The anarchist movement in the United States has had the support of leading libertarian intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky; but it has lacked a figure who could transform its guiding principles into something resembling a political movement. In the autumn of 2011, David Graeber seemed to be the man who could drag anarchism into mainstream politics. Graeber, along with other leading figures in the Occupy movement, coined the term ‘we are the 99 percent’. The catchphrase caught on, and within weeks — with the assistance of social media — Occupy transformed a small group of idealists with little support into a radical network occupying 800 cities around the world. Graeber’s

What do you do if you wake up to discover your colleagues implying that you have it easy? If you’re Benedict Cumberbatch, you just stick to your Star Trek script and carry on trying to destroy the world. Benedict Cumberbatch (educated at Harrow) was in the crossfire when Downton Abbey’s Rob James-Collier (Stockport working class and proud) implied that actors from public schools have it easy and suck up all the best jobs. James-Collier reckons you need a rich family behind you if you’re to survive the early years and stick it out until some decent-paying jobs come along. And James-Collier isn’t sure that rich kids make devoted actors. ‘If

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her

The weekend press offered some rave reviews of Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography. Craig Brown, who is not given to hyperbole, compared Moore’s book to a work of art, while the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley praised Moore’s ‘multi-dimensional portrait’ of the person we know as Mrs Thatcher. There were, however, some reservations. Rawnsley, brave man that he is, criticised Moore’s usage: ‘Moore is a patrician Old Etonian and a High Tory. So another of his challenges is to make the empathetic leap necessary to get inside the head of a grammar school girl who was born over a shop in Grantham. He makes a decent stab at it, but can’t always resist

Evgeny Morozov is an iconoclast. He believes that technology, if abused or misused, has the potential to make society less free. His latest book, To Save Everything , Click Here, builds on his acclaimed polemic The Net Delusion (about which he spoke to the Spectator last year) to challenge those who suggest that technology is the solution to all of life’s problems. Morozov describes how the technology of perfection is not necessarily compatible with democratic institutions and processes that are imperfect by definition. He reveals how ‘technological fixes’, particularly when coupled with market forces, threaten to close public debate and curtail personal choice; thereby moulding individuals into an efficient, homogenised