Word: britain
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...British student facing gloomy prospects, it was refreshing to hear such an accurate and level-headed analysis of the political situation in Britain, especially when MPs are so quick to naively dismiss the BNP's growing popularity as simply protest-voting to punish those whom we hold responsible for the recession. The article should remind MPs that BNP voters are not necessarily neo-Nazis or even racists. When Enoch Powell gave his "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968 he was dismissed from the shadow cabinet; how apt that in 2009, his predictions should have been realized and his policies seized...
...sounds a lot like France has just discovered the type of protests that have been used in places like the U.S. and Britain for years, that's partly true. It's also true that previous generations of French protesters have taken on single issues. But that has nearly always been as part of a mass movement. "Think of the feminists, the antiracism movement, the defenders of the needy - even the union demos that used to end by marchers helping themselves to whatever they found on supermarket shelves. All these things were earlier manifestations of what we're seeing with these...
...Empire - and the shadows they have cast over Britain - have been very good to Kureishi, providing him with two rich seams of material for his fiction. "When I was a kid, people were always talking about the death of the novel," he says, sitting in a café near his home in London's Shepherd's Bush. "But ever since [Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel] Midnight's Children, it's been terrifically lively. There's been a revolution in writing in the West. And that's thanks to colonialism." Read "God for the Godless: Salman Rushdie's Secular Sermon...
...Kureishi himself. For a quarter-century his films, plays and novels have captured the motley qualities of post-colonial Britain - its Karachi-born taxi drivers, jack-booted skinheads, coked-up admen and firebrand mullahs. His latest work, now playing at London's National Theatre, dramatizes his 1993 novel The Black Album. Set in 1989, during the furor over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, it follows a British Pakistani college boy torn between the delights of sex and Western culture and the lure of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is a fresh and funny bildungsroman, capturing an antic '80s London. Sadly...
...civil servant in the Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom all South Asians - even those, like Kureishi, born in Britain to an Indian father and an English mother - were Pakistanis, and whose friends went out on weekends looking for brown-skinned people to beat up, spun his anger into art. While other children of immigrants tried to create an identity through cast-iron faith, Kureishi forged his through rebellious fiction...