Over the past few years, the cultural scene has been absorbed by big questions about race; sex, gender and sexuality; migration and refuge; identity; the people versus the elites. Literary fiction sales have gone down, but readers are increasingly engaging with non-fiction. In a world where so many charged issues are front and centre, it’s hard to look away.

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What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

Gender inequality preoccupies me most. And books on the pornification of culture, rape culture, male violence, sexual exploitation, harassment and similar subjects have been piling up since well before the #MeToo movement. But I’m not sure many of them are written to change people’s minds. Indeed, they’re often bought by people who already agree with the books’ premise, and hope to shore up their own opinion.

But not my summer reads. These are persuasive: they call upon the reader’s empathy and ability to step into another’s shoes. Each of the books walks you through women’s experiences.

Inequality, prejudice and marginalisation both cause and are produced by these experiences – and the allusive approach of these books is all the more devastating because it shows the subtle totality of patriarchy. Misogyny isn’t just about sensationally shocking events but about the invisible and choking atmospheric surroundings: expectations, assumptions, stereotypes and judgements.

The books I’ve chosen may ultimately provoke political anger – but first of all they will connect with readers’ observations, memories and experiences.

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A survivor's guide to trauma

By Bidisha

Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado-Perez, reveals in precise detail how women have been ‘designed out’ of the world we live in: excluded from medical trials, tests of industrial goods, safety checks, urban planning and city design, infrastructure and countless other aspects of daily life.

As a result, we live in a world that is literally designed for men. Full of devastating examples, Criado-Perez’s reveals the sometimes fatal consequences of such an approach.

On more searingly personal territory, the brave and harrowing book, The Apology by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, is a radical reckoning with her abusive father. In reality, Ensler’s father was a terrifying figure and a perpetrator of sexual violation, family violence and decades of malice.

Ensler and her family never received justice or emotional resolution – so here, she has written her own conclusion. She tries to get under the skin and inside the thoughts of her father, to achieve the closure she longed for as a child. This is an uncomfortable, counterintuitive read – but a necessary confrontation.

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The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder, another American writer, looks behind the headlines about women killed by a partner or former partner, and explores the patterns of control, abuse, domination and gaslighting that perpetrators use to target and set up victims.

Her world is a gritty one, in which she speaks to everyone from survivors to profilers to detectives, to find out what will enable early detection and prevention of these crimes.

Ultimately, her stance is hopeful: not all men are perpetrators, male violence is not inevitable, and there are tactics and approaches that work to change things for the better.

Even when women are not in a fatally abusive situation, they – we – experience the corrosive effects of subtle mistreatment throughout our lives. Lisa Taddeo’s book about women’s emotional and personal lives, Three Women, is a quietly disturbing probe into gender dynamics which are at once utterly warped and totally normalised. Through the interviews, we encounter intelligent women whose natural desires are thwarted or exploited by the men in their lives, in painfully recognisable ways.

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How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism

By Joan Smith

Don’t Touch My Hair by the broadcaster, academic and journalist Emma Dabiri, combines the depth of cultural history with a lively examination of modern day attitudes to black women’s self-presentation, expression and presence. It also reflects on the subtleties of prejudice, from Western beauty standards to the representation of black women in the media.

Finally, Becoming by Michelle Obama. It’s an account of her journey from ambitious, well-loved daughter to First Lady. It touches upon race, class and gender, covering the vilification (as well as the plaudits) she received in public life. But it’s also a story of family and of the many different kinds of love she has given and received. It works as a tribute to resilience under political fire, but also as a simple walk through a woman’s life.

This is what unites all the books I’ve chosen for my summer reading list: they work through empathy and illustration, with maddening and moving results.

The Iron Age queen Boudica looms large in myth. She is revered as an awesome figure of female rage, a military leader raising an army against the occupying power of the Roman Empire, an avenger of men’s sexual violence and patriarchal entitlement, a bringer of justice fuelled by pain and anger, a native subject who refused to be ruled by a foreign invader. She is a symbol of resistance against colonialism and slavery.

At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Britannia had been occupied by the Romans for less than 20 years. King Prasutagus, ruler of the Iceni tribe, had acquiesced to Roman rule after the previous Emperor Claudius’s invasion in AD43 and a failed local rebellion four years later. Prasutagus accepted and adopted Roman ways and gave the Empire duties, loans, tithes and taxes from his people – including fees the Iceni had to pay to bury their own dead.

Then, in AD 60, Prasutagus died and left only half his estate to the new emperor, the notoriously cruel Nero, giving the other half to his daughters. In retaliation, the Romans plundered the household of his widow Queen Boudica’s household; she was flogged, her relatives enslaved and her daughters gang-raped. She and her tribe erupted in rebellion, and the Romans soon found themselves facing a general uprising.

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How 'The Favourite' failed Queen Anne

By Polly Mackenzie

Yet there is scant evidence that Boudica definitely existed, as I discovered when I was commissioned by a publisher to write a fictionalisation of her rebellion. I grew up on Manda Scott’s thrilling series of novels and on the television series starring Alex Kingston as the red-haired heroine. But looking at the actual (meagre) evidence presented by historians such as Richard Hingley, Christina Unwin, Marguerite Johnson, Nic Fields and Vanessa Collingridge opened my eyes.

There is almost no contemporaneous evidence from 60-61AD, the time of Boudica’s rebellion, identifying her as the revolutionary leader. The story of the Iceni tribe can be pieced together from some archaeological evidence, including fragments submerged in the molten matter produced by the scalding, decimating heat of the rebels’ fires in the Roman towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans) and Londinium (at that time a small, emergent outpost). There then followed a final battle against the Romans, led by general Suetonius Paulinus, but the exact location of this remains a mystery.

We don’t even know if Boudica — which simply means “Victory” — was her given name or a symbolic epithet, although there were certainly other Iron Age women leaders, such as Cartimandua of the northern Brigantes. The mythologising accounts we have of Boudica come from two later classical commentators, Tacitus (whose father-in-law had been an imperial governor in Britain) and Cassius Dio.

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How our first Asian MP shaped the Brexit debate

By Ian Birrell

It is these men — stalwarts of the Roman Empire themselves — who contributed unwittingly to the powerful image we have of her today, although they were written with quite the opposite intention. Boudica’s muscular frame, weaponry, mane of reddish-gold hair, glinting jewellery, flowing clothes and rousing speeches, delivered standing on her war chariot, are their inventions. These classical men tried to depict Boudica as an unnatural and uncouth barbarian she-devil but actually made her impressive to later readers, although their accounts were not rediscovered until the Renaissance humanist period.

Boudica’s achievement had been to unite a number of tribes, assembling a great horde of fighters that included the neighbouring Trinovantes, considered the most powerful in Britain. Together, they poured down through Camulodunum, Verulamium and Londinium, sacking and burning as they went. Some of the classical accounts of their massacres — such as those of women mutilated and impaled lengthways on stakes — are outlandish and cannot be proven either way. But there is no doubt about the level of physical destruction. The fires were thought to have reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. And Boudica’s army was so fierce that the Roman administrator, Catus Decianus, fled rather than face her.

The three towns Boudica’s army struck had symbolic power as imperial administrative centres, settlements for former Roman soldiers built on co-opted lands, as well as Romanised natives who had adopted the dress and habits of their colonisers. Although they might have been enjoyed by retired soldiers, they were not actively defended by the military, with the exception of a small retinue of troops slaughtered inside Claudius’s temple in Camulodunum.

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The first Englishman to change the world

By Robert Tombs

Although there are no contemporary verifications, the practicalities of moving an army of hundreds of thousands of fighters – and their families — across such distances suggests that Boudica’s campaign lasted several months, rather than weeks. By now, Emperor Nero would have known about it, and Suetonius Paulinus was under pressure to act against the barbarian upstarts.

Suetonius had been in Wales and now travelled to meet Boudica’s forces, with the full might of the Roman army behind him. The Romans were practiced technical fighters, excellent at strategy, calm, well-horsed and well-armoured, with expertly-built weaponry including arrows and spears, daggers and swords, as well as rounded full-body shields. Despite being outnumbered by Boudica’s fighters, they were simply a better war machine. They took up a position uphill of Boudica’s army, which was now squashed between the Romans and their own carts, laden with plunder, possessions and relatives.

That Boudica killed herself with poison cannot be verified, although it once again corroborates the myth of this warrior queen preferring death to ignominy and dishonour. The Romans took their revenge, seizing the rebel tribes’ valuable horses and plunder, torching the settlements and slaying the Iceni and those who had fought with them. They re-militarised the occupation, building and populating forts across their territory.

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Why our troubled times are perfect for poetry

By Bidisha

In the decades to come, the Romans would continue to bed in their occupation, and it wasn’t until nearly 400 years later that the land was finally rid of the empire and the colonisers left. Boudica’s rebellion in the early days was singular in its ferocity. It is its gendered aspect, I believe, which compels and fascinates many women who identify with her raw rage — as I do. The uprising failed, but it was indicative of the fact that the Romans’ presence in Britannia was never really easy, no matter how many towns they developed (among them Gloucester, Bath and York). They failed to take Caledonia — Scotland — and had to keep constant military vigilance against the tribes – tribes just like those that Boudica led.

Boudica occupies a unique place in the tale of early Britain: she is the native warrior who fought back against foreign invaders, the once obedient vassal who decided death was better than more dishonour, the anti-imperial, anti-slavery activist who got radical the moment things got personal. Of course the idolisation of Boudica, especially strong in the Victorian era, has usually glossed over Britain’s global infamy as slavers and colonisers running an empire that dwarfed Rome in size.

She has also been interpreted as a testament to a wronged woman’s zeal and a symbolic warning that a formerly compliant wife and mother is capable of any feat in defence of her family. The implication is that this is a nation that cannot be subjugated, co-opted or annexed by occupying forces and would never submit to the humiliation and violation of imperialism; that this island may be small, but has the guts to defend itself against anyone who dares to subdue it.

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Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Boudica’s war gave the Roman empire a hard jolt and served — I have no doubt — as an inspiration to the countless other tribes, settlements and occupied people that resistance, protest and fighting back were righteous and valuable. Without her, Britannia would be seen as just more territory to be easily conquered by the Roman war machine. Yet after her rebellion, Britannia was seen as a troublesome outpost of the Roman empire, one which required constant vigilance due to repeated acts of rebellion.

It cemented a national image that is both double-edged and enduring: the Brits as hard-drinking, easy-fighting hooligans, self-righteous, proud, eccentric, patriotic and defiant. That can be interpreted in any number of ways. Indeed Boudica has since the Victorian period been taken up very strongly by Britons of all politican and cultural persuasions: by suffragettes, abolitionists, imperialists, freedom fighters, feminists, pagans and others. Because so little is truly known about her, she has retained her mystique and stands as a universal and timeless symbol of the wronged woman lost to history.

It is this obscurity and mystery that drive people to endlessly rediscover her. She inspires me as a woman who refused to take abuse, internalise her anger or accept the perpetrations and humiliations of those in power. Her anger was her expression and her fuel. She required that she and her daughters be revenged and their rapists punished. Thousands of years later, I want the same thing.

It still is. Recent figures from Nielsen BookScan revealed that poetry sales grew last year by 12%, and that they had also grown in 2017. In fact, over the past six years or so, poetry has been enjoying a massive reputational transformation and artistic flowering.

The seeds of this renaissance were planted in the 1990s and 2000s, when established poets such as Andrew Motion and (especially) Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay become popular champions of the form, using their position as respected public figures and much-garlanded writers to make an argument for its richness, relevance and accessibility. This isn’t to say they dumbed it down. Quite the opposite: their literary activism continually reminded people that poetry is and always has been readable, pleasurable and relevant.

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Dylan Thomas: populist

By Freya Sanders

Our dark and troubled times have fertilised poetic activism – and given a new urgency to a new audience’s search for voices and words which give respect to every type of experience. Issues of races, class, gender, sexuality, inequality; acknowledgement of the pain and anxiety of oppression; expressions of terror for a dying world; the brave mining of personal experience: poetry is connecting with a young audience both comfortable with and hungry for previously unheard voices.

Interestingly, two thirds of poetry purchases over the past year were made by Millennials – of whom the majority were women. So, the poetry boom is gendered (although book sales of creative writing in all forms have always been dominated by women readers) and demographically weighted too. This has brought fresh interest and energy to the industry, revitalised poetry as an art form and finally given respect to those voices which are usually erased or ignored.

It has also diversified what is being commissioned, reviewed and written. There is a great impulse among this young audience to look beyond the traditional – read male, Western, historical – canons of literature. In poetry now, the boldest voices are those of women, queer writers (such as the award-winning Danez Smith and Jay Bernard) and non-white writers of all kinds. It’s there in Jacqueline Saphra’s new collection, Dad, Remember You Are Dead – a stunningly accomplished and frank reckoning with a terrifying, sleazy patriarchal figure. Meanwhile, Karen McCarthy Woolf’s collection, Seasonal Disturbances, takes on climate change and migration with delicacy and poignancy.

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Why we now know the pity of war

By Douglas Murray

Poetry has long needed this renaissance. It was once a chore, redolent of dust-covered lace doilies, post-war sobriety, wireless sets and births, marriages and funerals. I always wrote poetry, up until I was 13 or 14, then the dirge-like process of writing GCSE level essays analysing it squashed the joy out. The muse wasn’t awakened again until I saw Alice Oswald perform live in March 2015, reciting from memory. I bought her collection, Memorial, took up my own pen again and never looked back. I now write my prose fiction by expanding and piecing together my poetry like a mosaic.

Poetry’s long heritage allows it to be simultaneously cutting-edge and classic, drawing on past and present. It’s part of a global tradition: every culture has its own poetic history, or a ‘verse history’ through songs. Sappho’s beautiful words, for example, were set to haunting music and written to be sung, while songwriters like PJ Harvey have also published as poets. Even the most gifted rappers craft lines as delicately as any poet, and deliver them with great theatricality and skill. It’s also incredibly porous of other art forms like theatre, dance, rap and political provocation. My own first film as a director, An Impossible Poison, was an adaptation of a poem of mine, demonstrating how narrative and performance, words and visuals can blend together.

Historical poetry purists might balk at avant-garde cross-disciplinary work, or at the idea of poets uploading shots of their printed work onto Instagram, or putting a short performance video on YouTube. But this genre-agnostic, discipline-hopping approach is natural for the young. Poets have always performed their work in live settings but for so many readers, classrooms imprisoned words on pages; students were turned off poetry by the memory of boring lessons. Something has shifted, though, and poetry has been liberated by the internet.

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Iris Murdoch: philosopher, novelist, life coach

By Hannah Altorf

Ultimately, live events and book sales have seen a rise in attendance and purchases because of what poets put online. The digital aspects of poets’ work are a shopfront, an introduction, a playpen, an experimental space, not some kind of threat to the poetry gods.

I love the punkish, DIY, multi-disciplinary creativity of contemporary poets. However, finding an audience online or being part of a cool, small-scale performance poetry night doesn’t guarantee wider recognition or a long term career. Poetry needs and deserves institutional support and investment in order to survivel. So why aren’t there more opportunities for poets to build their careers and be supported in creating a body of work, with book advances, appearance fees, paid residencies and commissions? Perhaps this will change as poetry’s allure grows.

Poetry gets to the heart of things quickly and effectively, with a unique mixture of emotional immediacy and technical sophistication. We are living in news, commentary and media-saturated times, with a constant cycle of reportage, reaction and political speculation. The digital revolution has enabled new poets to find a platform. But it has also led to both a fracturing of our attention span and an overwhelming proliferation content.

Poetry’s brevity, purity and clarity cuts through all of that. It can address the most pressing issues; in Claudia Rankine’s famous recnt collection Citizen, she looks at race and racism in America through a palimpsest-like construction, which includes prose and testimony as well as traditional formal poetry.

It can also mine the deepest emotions. And yet (for me at least), reading it is an act of solitary contemplation. You can’t rush reading poetry and you can’t deny its candour and wisdom, even when the outer world gives us lots of reasons to panic.

#MeToo is about saying: this happened to me, I’m not lying, I’m not mistaken, I’m not exaggerating; it was abuse, and it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Here is my truth.

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The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Sharing our truth is powerful and important, but there are many stages still to go before we find peace (forget about resolution, justice or karma!). Luckily, there are many books that can help this process.

My #MeToo story is called ‘Emotional Violence and Social Power’ and while I don’t have the space, strength or tears to go over everything that’s happened since I wrote it, I want to share some of the books that I’ve read since. I have no idea when or if true recovery will ever come, but the books I’ve named here, none of which are self-help books and all of which are written by experts in their field, are valuable reads. All the books take a holistic view, looking at the psychology, physiology, sociology and the cultural ramifications of aggression, survival, and the search for justice and emancipation from the triggering, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of trauma.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery is an international bestseller and the definitive book on PTSD. Be prepared to cry. It’s a wrenchingly honest, compassionate and honourable read, written with deep understanding. Alongside that I would recommend several complementary classics: Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score and Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers both examine how psychological pain is held in the body as well as the mind.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I also strongly recommend Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, which looks at the effects of detachment, abandonment, abuse of trust and violation in childhood. Freyd is a real buzz-name at the moment. The aptness of her acronym for the behaviour of wrong-doers when confronted, DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – is evident in the reactions of high-profile abusive men as they are brought to account.

While I don’t think it’s our responsibility to psychoanalyse our aggressors or listen to their excuses, there are some fascinating books on abusers. They make for a grisly, shocking and – be warned – sometimes triggering read. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door is a sensational introductory book and a good starting point.

For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship, there are some very striking and (again) classic works: Power and Control by Sandra Horley, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft and From Charm To Harm by Gregory Zaffuto are all precise examinations of abusers who are often glib and charming on the surface and who rely on control, gaslighting, isolation and threats to first psychologically manipulate and then physically terrorise their victims.

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The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Finally, as awareness of coercive control and abuse develops, I want to recommend a remarkable memoir by Helen Walmsley-Johnson. Look What You Made Me Do is a survivor’s memoir written with depth, literary flair, candour and clarity by one of the most insightful journalists working today.

When I read these books, I cried with pain, recognition, admiration and gratitude for these writers’ wisdom and compassion.

Last week, I gave a keynote lecture at a major university about “these troubled times”. I said that I felt that the mainstream political rhetoric around me has become divisive and insular, and that the tenor of discussion itself has become aggressive. I wondered how I might regain a feeling of clarity and stability.

I thought the students, academics and university support staff in the audience would put up their hands and tell me about all the projects and initiatives they’re involved in that prove my despondency wrong. Instead, we were all in sober agreement. We joked that the lecture was to be a kind of blood-letting where we released our sense of anxiety and tried to analyse what fed it.

So, what has caused this sense of malaise? At its heart, I think the prognosis is so frightening that we don’t want to face it. I think we are edging towards a third world war. It doesn’t look like the previous two world wars. There are no big blocs of allies sending tanks against a common enemy: the liberal democrats against the authoritarian fascists.

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No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

There is no single front. Instead, there are a dozen different points of fracture and crisis: cyber warfare and climate change are ushering in an unknown future; a new generation of technocratic power-holders such as Facebook and Amazon seem to be above the law and wield more influence than individual nation states; networks of vested interests (think of men such as Steve Bannon and Aaron Banks) are allegedly able to skew public opinion and sow political division.

Ordinarily, the battle lines would be clearly drawn: pluralistic, progressive and open societies would speak out against militarised, repressive, heavily controlled and regressive (say, in terms of attitudes to LGBT people and women’s roles) states.

But ideology no longer offers certainty: we see such counter-intuitive overtures as Trump’s admiring comments about Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. We notice centrist and Left-leaning parties absorbing the concerns and kowtowing to the interests of the far-Right – such as their “admission” that immigration, multiculturalism and plurality of faith, heritage, colour, language and culture are to be interrogated and resisted instead of fostered.

Across Left and Right alike, public debate has been corrupted by aggression, sloganeering and macho posturing. I have voted Labour all my life, except in protest after Iraq and Brexit, when I voted Lib Dem. But in this new aggressive world, to criticise Jeremy Corbyn is to receive vicious abuse from his cult followers, along with the accusation of being “a Blairite”!

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Could you spot a tyrant in the making?

By Douglas Murray

So even Labour, supposedly the party that champions feminist values and racial diversity, is governed by a macho principle. I hate Corbyn’s thug army of tight black T-shirted footsoldiers just as much as I hate any boys’ club. Yet their aggressive mode of action has become normalised, leaving me feeling alienated both from governing party and opposition alike.

At a much wider level, we are seeing the frightening manifestation of this macho principle in global rulers: men such as Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, Orban, Edogan, Salvini, Duterte and Bolsonaro. They share the same qualities, values and demeanour, despite differences of historical context, geographic location and political system.

Brexit and Trump are a part of this new worrying world, but they are both signs of a broader tendency. It is suggested, by some, that the Brexit vote was racist and the 2016 US election result was propelled by misogyny against Clinton and a whitelash against Obama, and that both represent a self-righteous philistinism. But that would be to avoid the hard fact that some of the grievances which led to these results had been incubated by decades of under-investment in basic services, education, infrastructure and healthcare; by stalled social mobility, painful inequality and the destruction of workers’ rights, benefits and job security.

As a result, we see, in England, people who can’t afford a home, even if they work all hours. We see people who have to visit food banks in order to feed themselves. Ordinary people no longer believe that anyone at the top is advocating for them. And it’s happening the world over as infrastructure, mobility and ordinary people’s safety net dissolves around them.

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How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

There’s a tendency towards insularity, self-righteous monoglot ignorance, xenophobia, nativism, white supremacy and jingoism. Ugly hate crimes and racist violence against anyone who looks or sounds ‘different’ are out in the open and increasing. It’s online, sure. But it’s also on the streets. I’m experiencing comments and insults and the kind of casual racism that my mother heard 45 years ago, but that I had been spared, until now.

On a train to Hull, City of Culture, in 2017, the chatty woman next to me was regaling the carriage with dreams about her forthcoming retirement in Spain. Then she lowered her voice, gave me a long sidelong glance and said, “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate other races or anything, but,” then she began snickering, “I’m getting the hell out of this country!”

A half-Pakistani but fair-skinned friend of mine was in a taxi, also in Hull, and commented, “This looks like a nice town.” “That’s because there’s no foreigners in it,” retorted the driver.

At an everyday level, there is an underlying feeling of aggression and self-righteousness – as a woman of colour I have a fine-tuned sense for latent prejudice, having dealt with it all my life – and I have seen multiple times how petty arguments, say in a shop queue or on the street, end with me or another person of colour being told, “If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.”

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How Corbyn captured the middle class

By James Bloodworth

What happened to so affect public rhetoric and to empower this kind of self-righteous, philistine aggression? It’s the result of the conflation of several issues: the fear of terrorism, Islamophobia, scepticism about multiculturalism, aversion to immigration and immigrants and scare-mongering around refuge and asylum.

People are afraid and state action is doing nothing to dispel these fears – if anything, it’s making things worse, much like Theresa May’s “hostile environment” speech did  back in 2015.

We’re seeing the steady normalisation of detention, invasive control in the name of security, imprisonment, internment, militarisation, surveillance, police violence, forced family break-ups and state brutality.

Donald Trump’s camps for migrant children are a repulsive new low in this dark tendency, as are China’s camps for its Uighur minority and the ghettoisation of Syrian refugees in camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

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Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

It beggars belief that barely a decade ago we were watching the pan-Arab revolutions. With its hopeful young populace taking to the streets, building on previous generations of pro-democracy activism to protest against Mubarak, Gaddafi, Assad and other authoritarian leaders, the so-called Arab Spring shimmered with potential and optimism.

The region has now devolved into a horror show of fragile states, unaffiliated militia, terrorist death cults like ISIS and razed homelands from which millions are fleeing – in addition to those escaping extreme poverty, political persecution, authoritarianism and climate change from Afghanistan. Iran and Iraq, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

My fear is that once Angela Merkel – the last grown-up in the room and a woman I admire for her stance on refuge and asylum – has left political life, we will not be able to turn things around. We will be over-powered by the fascist tendency. The signs are loud and clear: even where they have not ascended to outright power, the far-Right have made significant election gains across the world.

At my university talk, a woman asked me what a solution could be, if our unease was just making us ill and grassroots activity (such as the large rallies in favour of a People’s Vote) weren’t making much impact on those in power, at the top of the hierarchy.

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How irresponsible Merkel let populism thrive

By Peter Franklin

We agreed that the system itself didn’t need to be smashed up and reconfigured; indeed, there is no time left for that. Instead, we need a cohesive, strong and distinctive opposition, one which boldly stands against what is happening now and faces contemporary issues head-on.

If we do not get it together, we are handing the world over to society’s worst tendencies. A macho, violent race war is exactly what both ISIS and the white supremacists want.

Social breakdown, with the spoils up for grabs, is exactly what rich and powerful vested interests want. Division, escapism and isolation is exactly what the technocrats want, the better to monetise all those clicks and maintain the flow of entertainment and fake news keeping us hooked to our screens.

And a loss of faith in institutions and organisations of justice, government and culture are what the philistines want, so that they can seize power and rule by mob force and the threat of violence.

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Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

As a political analyst, I dislike overblown reactions, passive fatalism or the tabula rasa, shock-doctrine death-drive that welcomes catastrophe in the desperate hope of building a better world in the ruins. But if we look at the facts and observe what is going on, it is worrying.

The fascist tendency crosses vast differences of language, region and culture and has infiltrated mainstream discourse. It is difficult to find a united bloc of international allies who will work together to fight it. As such we are in a worse position than during 1914-1948. If my worst fears are true, anyone born this year will inherit a broken world and a decimated earth.

I hope that I’m wrong. I hope I laugh about this essay two years from now. I hope I am being hysterical, paranoid, misguided or any other word a troll could throw at me. But I am worried. Not by the negative factors I’ve outlined but by the lack of effective, unified and powerful opposition to this atrocious thuggery. We need to find our voice, unify our forces, defend our beliefs and wield our power before time runs out and trouble comes to our door.

Although published over a decade ago, and are set in some unspecified future time, the books have a painfully familiar resonance. While the Hollywood pitch line might be “desperate teenagers fight to the death in a human-made arena for the entertainment of the hedonistic and out-of-touch citizens of the Capitol”, the novels and their subsidiary themes seem shockingly pertinent today.

As now, The Hunger Games series shows us a country of grinding poverty and social division, with Panem split into 13 districts that are markedly different, isolated from each other and almost ghettoised, with the poorest and most hard-worked citizens in overwhelmingly non-white or racially mixed districts. While there are many more citizens than authority figures, the general populace is so tired, beaten-down, hungry and poor that despite occasional and brutally put-down rebellions there is initially little real will to fight. Resistance occurs at the individual level, through small instances of subterfuge or satire and petty sabotage, which are heavily outweighed by paranoia and self-censorship.

The people in the districts grow used to the increasing militarisation of their society, in which the use of armed police officers and security patrols, abuse of due legal process, universal surveillance and the targeting of rebels becomes increasingly normalised. As the political leaders in the Capitol increase their social control, they test what they can get away with, until corporal punishment and the public torture of detractors becomes the norm.

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Three books to explain the Summer of Populism

By Henry Olsen

The evil President Snow controls, censors and manipulates the media in a number of subtle ways. Most obviously, the games themselves, and their popularity amongst viewers despite the real violence and harm they depict, demonstrate the pacifying and distracting power of entertainment. Millions across the country tune in to watch young, photogenic, real people fight, fall in love and struggle to survive.

Just as real-world viewers of Love Island, The X Factor, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and The Apprentice do, those who watch the Hunger Games sublimate their hopes, wishes and pain, even their desire to strive or fight or rebel, through the actions of the young people on the screen – all without having to get off the sofa and do anything themselves. The games serve as a cathartic release of tension (which would be better directed against their oppressors) and a doping mechanism at the same time.

When things begin to go wrong for Snow, and the traumatised participants in the games join together, organise and fight back, the media takes on a new dimension. Snow – not unlike Trump – begins to twist language into its opposite. He claims that the rebels are trouble-makers, not freedom fighters; they don’t want to cure the Capitol of its ills but destabilise it; they are not fighting for truth and justice but are in fact corrupt liars themselves.

Through slander, derailment, diversion and straight-up falsehood, Snow uses the screens beamed into every home in Panem to peddle his own take on events. Most people, sitting at home far away from the wealth and influence of the Capitol, are not in a position to know to truth or to question the propagandistic version of events which they are presented with, and as a result of these manipulations society becomes ever more divided and mistrustful. The rebels too, are not immune from these dynamics, and the books show us that dictatorial behaviour, personal ambition, moral corruption, inhumane methods and thuggery can be just as prevalent among revolutionaries as autocrats.

As a reader, I get lost in The Hunger Games books for their action, characterisation and spare, beautiful writing. As a political person of the 21^stcentury, however, the books are less an escape, more of a wake-up call about what’s happening right now.

In Britain, the political system is currently stymied by Brexit, with both main parties deeply split over the issue. We have a cultish and ineffective Opposition and an embattled Prime Minister who probably heaves a sigh of stony dread every morning as she goes to the office.

There is widespread public mistrust of establishment figures in power and cynicism about the integrity of major institutions. Civic life and community cohesion are breaking down and social mobility has stalled.

In such a climate, it is easy to scapegoat those who have even less power and cannot answer back: foreigners, outsiders, strangers. Cultural insularity and philistinism is increasing. Fear of others, fear of difference and knee-jerk judgements, based on skin colour, clothing and language are stoked by tabloid headlines and world leaders alike. Sexual violence is endemic and, by and large, perpetrators act with impunity.

So bring on the Radical Liberation Front! My party will make significant changes to the values and the structure of society. It will offer liberation from misogyny, machismo and endemic male violence and from stubborn jingoism, xenophobia and increasing cultural myopia. It will drag this philistine, patriarchal, phone-addicted Little Englander nation into the kind of 21^stcentury that women would actually want to live in.

In many ways, the RLF is nothing new. It simply embodies the principles of feminist socialism. It envisions a state in which the games of domination, combat, accumulation and mastery are derided rather than valued. Exploitation and subjugation of all kinds – in families and factories, boardrooms and war rooms and bedrooms – will be replaced by honesty, communication and vulnerability.

In short: a profoundly different world on every level. So how would we make that come about?

Brexit would have to be overturned, obviously, and if those who voted for it want to riot in the streets for three days, let them. Citizens have rioted in the UK over far more important things, like entrenched racism and police killings of unarmed black men – and nothing changed. After three days, the rioting would calm down and the RLF would go to Tusk, Juncker, Merkel and Barnier to eat some crow.

Then the RLF would be able to focus on improving the basics of life for everyone so that daily existence is not a struggle but a reliable, common basis from which to try and live. There would be free universal healthcare, childcare, education, housing, community centres, early years family support and elderly care – all paid for by forcing rich individuals and mega-corporations operating in the UK to pay the correct tax instead of exploiting legal loopholes. Domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centres and refugees’ resource centres would be fully funded and childcare, nursing and elderly care providers would be among the best respected and best paid, not the worst paid, people in the country.

The RLF would listen to women and children, to ensure that perpetrators of violence and abuse against them do not enjoy impunity but are punished for as long as it takes to recover from abuse – which is a lifetime. The criminal justice system would be overhauled with training given to the police, the media, juries and judges given in the extent, reality and consequences of sexual trauma, domestic violence, coercive control and other types of mainly male violence.

Further reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

The entire justice process would start from a position of listening to, believing and supporting survivors. Character assassination, consideration of past sexual history and perpetrators cross-examining their own victims would be outlawed. Sexual crimes would incur compulsory full-life sentences. Women seeking vigilante justice against their perpetrators in the failure of official justice methods would be at liberty to do so.

At the same time, I would reform the prison system. Young people who have suffered disordered lives with poverty of opportunity and poor education, who get caught up in petty crimes related to gangs, drugs or theft would not be jailed. Instead, they’d be channelled towards challenging and useful community labour.

Since the RLF champions multiculturalism, multi-coloured Britain and multilingualism, it would close all detention centres, scrap the Home Office system of denial and discouragement, allow asylum seekers the right to work and open up Britain’s borders.

Prostitutes would be decriminalised, destigmatised and freed from police harassment and brutalisation. Men who think it’s okay to rent women for their own use would be criminalised and jailed for 20 years for their arrogance, violation and entitlement. Same goes for men who think it’s okay to sit back and be gratified while a knackered woman strips and dances for them. In the RLF state, women would not be objectified commodities to be used for others’ gratification.

Wealth, fame, possessions and power would no longer be prized above compassion, consideration for others, inclusion, emotional intelligence and co-operation. Wages for different professions would be brought in line with each other to eliminate the judgement, competition and status-games which cause so much unnecessary angst and egotism. Meanwhile, all workplaces and all major cultural institutions would have a proper crèche and flexible hours. And employers who discriminate against women on maternity leave and new mothers would be punished. There would be proper use-it-or-lose it paternity leave for fathers.

Further reading

Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

By Giles Fraser

In schools, there would be compulsory sex and relationship counselling from primary school upwards, in an attempt to combat porn culture and endemic sexual bullying and assault. They would tell the unvarnished truth about our history, from slavery to colonialism, and  put money into promoting the study of the arts, music and humanities as well as vocational skills and trade apprenticeships. Learning at least one other language would be compulsory from an early age. That way the country might produce cultured, well-rounded and curious individuals.

Oh, and sexual harassment anywhere, in schools, on the street, on public transport, in every sector and every profession, would be punished by spontaneous human combustion!

Crucial evidence is emerging on the ground in places like Jordan, where some things have been made to work, and Lebanon, where economics have lost out to politics. Meanwhile, the balance of conversation about refugees in Europe is stuck on whether or not they are coming this way. They are not. Media images of refugees are emotive but dishonest, showing them in camps or on boats, when in fact they are in cities like Jordan’s capital, Amman, trying to fend for themselves.

Countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Ethiopia, where a refugee jobs pact has been struck, will determine where and in what conditions refugees live. These ideas and experiments need the oxygen of attention and journalistic scrutiny to keep career politicians and multilateral lenders honest about what is working and what is not.

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Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.