Book Reviews

Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a short story prize for unpublished writers. The competition, which is limited to residents of Great Britain and Ireland, opens on 1 December 2012 and closes on 1 March 2013. Submissions should be made at thewhitereview.org. The prize will be judged by the writer Deborah Levy, Karolina Sutton and Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape.

A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients. Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker’s attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light

Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic, on the other hand, was a place of contest for centuries. European nations fought for supremacy and plunder upon it, traded for wealth across it, and scrambled for territory around it. According to John K. Thornton, author of A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820, the creation of an ‘Atlantic World’ was driven by the hunger of European states for hard cash. Money was needed to support the fantastically expensive armies which, from the late Middle Ages onwards, European

In his new book Classified: Secrecy and The State In Modern Britain, Dr Christopher Moran gives an account of the British state’s long obsession with secrecy, and the various methods it used to prevent information leaking into the public domain. Using a number of hitherto declassified documents, unpublished letters, as well as various interviews with key officials and journalists, Moran’s book explores the subtle approach used by the British government in their attempt to silence members of the civil service, and journalists, from speaking out about information that was deemed classified. Moran points out the inherent hypocrisy at work, when leading political figures of the 20th century, such as Lloyd

Boycott Amazon was the message from Margaret Hodge MP in last weekend’s Observer. This comes in the wake of new revelations about just how little UK tax is paid by Amazon and other corporate giants Starbucks and Google. According to Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, Amazon’s UK sales amounted to £3.9 billion last year, but it paid just 2.5 per cent tax on its estimated profits thanks to channelling sales through its Luxembourg HQ. There is a feeling that although it is legal, it isn’t fair that a company which has warehouses and employs 15,000 people in the UK doesn’t pay enough tax. Some argue that it is down to HMRC