“In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from the concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those that have power and those that don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market- friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.”

This is how the scale of the undiscovered country remains so hidden – because three quarters of the population look around them and see nothing but prosperity. There is a veil over the experience of the other quarter. When the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, told the House of Commons in 1988, ‘Everyone in the nation has benefited from increased prosperity – everyone’, she was drawing this veil deliberately across the truth, but for most people there is nothing cynical about it. For the most part, they simply do not see it”.

Heavy shit. A very important account of Egypt’s Arab Spring & the transformations that have occurred in its disastrous aftermath.

Perhaps the most pernicious toxin in the Chump Disintegration’s tank of disease – Javanka.

The Accusation-forbidden stories from inside North Korea:

“We will worship the Great Leader until the sun and moon go out”

Billed as the first piece of regime critical fiction from within North Korea by a dissident writer (the only hitherto examples of such documentation being from successful defectors), The Accusation encompasses seven separate stories that have been smuggled out to the world at large & found their way to print.

I needed a crash course in the governments involvement in antileft action in California, and solid sources to tell me how Manson could have been swept up in it. I focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective. According to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the leftwing movement by any means necessary – an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.

Its about time! this is potentially the best book I have read on ‘The Kingdom’ & delivers a remarkable exposure into this secretive, routinely self-misrepresenting “ultraconservative theocratic autocracy”. With immense finesse & substantive diplomatic tact, author Nicola Sutcliff – & over 28 Saudi women from a vast & varied pool of social positions – render a brilliant intra-exposé.

a massively absorbing series of accounts from beyond the Berlin Wall (the majority of course occurring prior to its 1989 collapse).

Whoa! Initially published in 2015, when Operation Car Wash was blowing its gaskets. Half memoir & all observatory, Extreme City throws wide the unique abhorrence & awesomeness of the beleaguered & siege-stricken prodigy that is Rio, & the greater country of Brazil. This is one of the best & most personal scribes I have streaked on the region (Soares is a carioca – “Rio born & bred”), reclining amongst the likes of Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil & Misha Glenny’s excellent Nemesis.

An annual tradition – it’s the all new World Press Photo yearbook 2019!