Toby Hill is a London-based freelance journalist
“Is Gatsby great? Outline arguments on both sides of the debate.”
Over the last couple of months, I’ve travelled around London’s richest boroughs posing this question. Like innumerable other semi-employed graduates, I work part-time as a private tutor. Private tuition is one of the country’s few booming industries, which says a lot about both graduate job prospects and the inequity of opportunity in contemporary Britain.
As an English tutor, a pleasing irony hangs over the whole enterprise. The authors I discuss, from Miller to Steinbeck to Fitzgerald to Priestley, invariably explore the damaging consequences of inequality in the societies of their time. Read More
Here are this week’s most read articles:
The human rights organisation said its researchers had found physical evidence that Syrians were tortured. They also found a device which former detainees said was used to stretch or bend victims’ arms and legs.
The head of America’s Internal Revenue Service has been replaced following news the organisation unfairly investigated conservative groups.
2,900 police officers have been cut in London since May 2010, according to new figures released by the Metropolitan Police.
The effect in the UK has been to squeeze out borrowing by public corporations that would be entirely justified by their business plans. One casualty has been council housing but attention is now being given to other sectors, like transport and the Royal Mail.
• Not for the first time this parliament David Cameron has been besieged by Eurosceptic MPs demanding he call an in or out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
The Brendan O’Neill formula is a simple but effective one: work out what any reasonably decent human being would think about an issue and write the opposite.
In the November 2011 general elections, six months after Spaniards occupied town squares across the country, including famously Madrid’s Plaza del Sol, the forces of reaction were projected into government.