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The Best Books of Any Year: Three Variations on Post-Truth
Astrid Alben
‘2016 is almost over but the impact of this year’s political events will reverberate around the globe for decades.’
Brexit Win
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
‘The poor hated the poor, natives hated outsiders, settled migrants hated new incomers, the North hated the South, non-Londoners hated London.’
When Denmark Criminalised Kindness
Lisbeth Zornig Andersen
‘We now know that it is a criminal offence to help refugees in distress.’
The Secret Afterlife of Boats
Anna Badkhen
‘The sea is broken,’ they say. An empty net at night: a drooping lattice of shiny nothingness, a cold and worthless tinsel mesh.
Free will and Brexit
Julian Baggini
‘Whether or not you think 23 June was a great day for Britain and Europe, it was a very bad one for freedom.’
Violence in Blue
Patrick Ball
‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’
He Had His Reasons
Colin Barrett
Colin Barrett on the Hawe family murder-suicide, and what the Irish media’s coverage tells us about the nation’s prejudices.
Best Book of 1991: Mao II by Don DeLillo
Colin Barrett
‘The ultimate goal of each act of art, each work of terror, is to demolish the old, incumbent reality, and create a new one.’
The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion
Kevin Barry
‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’
Crossings
Tim Beckett
‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.
Best Book of 2000: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Will Boast
Will Boast on why Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent is the best book of 2000.