Jenny Turner

Fringe meetings​ at Labour Party Conference can serve different functions. People use them for networking, to swap business cards, pick up tips: the lifelong Labour supporter and the loyally Labour energy company executive both come by the Harland & Wolff business breakfast to take a look. People use them to drop in and out of, foraging for food and freebies. The PolicyMogul canvas tote...

In June​ 2021, shortly after she was kicked off Twitter, Naomi Wolf gave an interview to Rosie Kinchen of the Sunday Times. ‘She is increasingly out on a limb,’ Kinchen observed, listing Wolf’s top topics of the time, the anti-lockdown stuff and the anti-masking and the terror of ‘vaccine passports’, and noting that she had just appeared on Steve Bannon’s...

After​ the death of his mother, a man called Beeklam turns to collecting statues, which he keeps in the flooded basement of his house in Amsterdam. Thelma, he calls one specimen – it was his mother’s name. Others are Rosalind, Diane, Magdalena, Gertrud, after his mother’s friends. Because the basement, ‘like the sewers’, is connected to the sea, ‘it was a...

‘Think Pink!’ Kay Thompson exhorted, playing a singing Diana Vreeland in Funny Face (1957), one of several Hollywood movies of the postwar period set in a pasteboard advent-calendar Paris, with Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn as the elegant, monstrously innocent gamine. ‘Pink for shoes! Pink for hose! Pink for gloves and chapeaus!’ The song, disappointingly, fails to...

In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly...