Alan Hollinghurst

Thursday

Alan Hollinghurst

Keeping the peace: the politics of policing protest

41 min listen

On the podcast: In his cover piece for The Spectator Ian Acheson discusses the potential disruption to Armistice Day proceedings in London this weekend. He says that Metropolitan Police Chief Mark Rowley is right to let the pro-Palestine protests go ahead, if his officers can assertively enforce the law. He joins the podcast alongside Baroness Claire Fox to discuss the problems of policing protest.  Next: are smartphones making us care less about humanity?  This is the question that Mary Wakefield grapples with in her column in The Spectator. She says it’s no wonder that Gen Z lack empathy when they spend most of their lives on social media. She is joined by Gaia Bernstein, author of Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies.

Wednesday

Alan Hollinghurst

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose work was path-breaking, and influence enduring. Each plaque that goes up is the result, first and foremost, of advocacy by a member of the public, and after that of strong support from the deciding panel, on which I sat for six years. We ended up each time rejecting the majority of the proposals, and it was a happy day for me, an almost unexpected breakthrough, when Firbank was proposed five years ago, and the panel readily accepted him. Acceptance has not always been his lot.