I've been piecing together this Guardian Long Read for over two years - on the British government's secret, forced repatriation of Liverpool's Chinese seamen in 1945-6. Hundreds of husbands and fathers were never seen again by their British families - it's a truly shocking story. It's in today's paper filling 5 pages, and online now
New piece in the Guardian Long Read section today: on British historical memory, nostalgia for tough times, and some of the daftest memes you'll evet see
"Olive trees should be our borders," as Dani Karavan said. On the Camino Walter Benjamin on the anniversary of his death, escaping the Nazis, WB's legacy, and the angel of history - in the FT Weekend Magazine today. I'll post more about it on my Substack soon probably, and it's on the FT website ofc, but if you're in the UK, read it in print this weekend. Thanks to @spitzenprodukte for the company and wisdom along the way, and @cordeliaj for commissioning and brilliant editing
What does a creative life sound like when you listen back? 🎶
Join authors Lloyd Bradley, Dan Hancox (@danhancox ) and Emma Warren (@_emmalwarren_ ) for an in‑conversation panel exploring how music shaped their teenage years and led them to their creative paths. Through stories and shared listening, they’ll be playing tracks they’ve personally chosen — charting the sounds, scenes and moments that influenced their work, politics and cultural thinking.
📅 Saturday 13 June
🕓 4–5.30pm
📍 Deptford Lounge
🎟 Book now via the Raised Voices link in our bio
New Substack post from me about a journey to 'deep England', a WW2-themed tea room and Nigel Farage's local pub. And the new episode of Cursed Objects with Patrick Wright. Link in bio.
I wrote the first half of this using speech-to-text software, and the second half with one hand on my mobile phone while waiting at KCH urgent care unit (fractured my wrist argh). And it's unpaywalled, so now you have to read it :p
Thank you @nrgsrhc for navigating!
CO is back, with a dream guest for Dan and Kasia: Professor Patrick Wright, author of On Living in an Old Country and The Village That Died for England, joins us for an urgent and timely conversation about Englishness, heritage, national decline, landscapes, Brexit and Reform, historical memory, and social and cultural disintegration.
This is a conversation about "the direly persistent English question" - one which will not go away.
"I don’t even have a history O’level - history came to me, rather than me coming to it,” Patrick tell us, taking us on a fascinating journey beginning in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher appealed loudly to “tradition”, while ripping up norms that would ensure many things would never be the same. We discuss why politics often amounts to, in Patrick’s words, “conjuring with the bones of the dead”, and why the telling of our history is so often framed in terms of crisis: as Heritage in Danger.
How does the landscape shape our idea of the nation, and vice versa? We chew over some great symbolic moments - “radioactive anecdotes” like the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree, the Crooked House pub fire, Foot and Mouth, Dutch Elm disease (“the whole landscape was like a cemetery”), and the elevating of HMS Mary Rose from the sea bed after 450 years.
Only 3000 people are invited to Davos, home of the World Economic Forum - and you’re one of them! Well, not really. But welcome anyway to this chocolate-box Swiss mountain town, transformed via "the Champions League of logistics" into a de facto military base for the world's economic, political and corporate superpowers.
Guiding us through this deeply cursed world is very special guest @caitlin.roisin.doherty , smuggling us in to encounter some profoundly cursed Davos freebies. Saudi Arabia-sponsored hand warmers? Meta-branded hot chocolate? Pinterest ramen? Ice cream with crickets in? These seemingly disparate objects are a window into the centres of elite power, ‘Great Reset’ conspiracies, the Epstein files, crypto and AI bubbles, and the mysterious technocrat that is Davos Man. How has Davos - the town, and the economic forum - changed, in a world where globalisation is allegedly in retreat? What has changed under the second Trump administration? When was peak Davos, and has it passed? Are Chinese capitalists inside or outside the tent? And what happens when the capitalist class run out of ideas about where to put their money?
Another new, free-to-read Substack mini-essay from me: on llondon actress's country, possibly the tune of 2025, a year of racist mini-roundabouts, acid patriotism, and the unexpected Flag Play coming from the UK rap underground. Please read, share and subscribe! You do this for money, I do this because I love it 🫡
❄️✨New episode!! ✨❄️
What would Christmas be without a tour of London’s lights? For the first of our free xmas podcasts, Kasia and Dan go UP TOWN for an outside (!!) walking tour through Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Known as stressful hot-spots for holiday season breakdowns, these Central London capitalistic hell-holes must have some redeeming features, right?!
We find out what London’s markets were like in 1870, and why Covent Garden has become London’s epicentre of festive fun. And we ask: why have Germanic Christmas markets sprung up everywhere via American films that make Christmas seem more idyllic than it really is? Admiring the neat Bratwurst, surprisingly acceptable beer and very poor puns, we throw ourselves into the Leicester Square ‘experience economy’. Finally, given that they want us to look up and marvel at the Christmas lights (rather than be terrified of oncoming traffic), why has the City of London not just pedestrianised central London?
Find the episode in all your usual spots!
Not the Queen of Hearts! Greetings, England's roses, and welcome back to the People's Podcast - this week, it's the original parasocial relationship: ROYALTY.
That's right, Kasia and Dan are exploring the universe of royal grief tat (ft. this extraordinary IN MEMORIAM Diana Beanie Baby), Princess Di standom, 90s tabloids and the media hysteria around her death and funeral, when Britain discovered EMOTIONS and behaved like honking loons.
So it's a wild ride in a white Fiat Uno, discussing dark souvenirism, the anatomy of a Beanie Baby, mourning in Harvester, the hoarding of historic newspapers, a riot in Woolworths over Candle in the Wind '97, and er ... whatever happened to jacket potatoes?
