Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights by Dominic Raab
4th Estate, £8.99

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI, director of Liberty, in her opening remarks to the Convention of Modern Liberty at the Institute of Education earlier this year, told the story of what happens when a frog is placed in a saucepan full of water and heat is gradually applied, in order to convey how freedom can be eroded. (The same story is sometimes used by climate change campaigners to illustrate what is happening to our weather, poor frogs.) The frog adapts to the change in temperature, but ultimately boils to death. That, she said, is what is happening to our freedom. And that is what Dominic Raab in this book believes has happened to our rights since Labour came to power in 1997.

I AM not sufficiently familiar with the television series The Thick of It to be able to confirm whether the feature film spin-off, In the Loop, is as funny as or better than the parliamentary satire which inspired it. All I can say is that it is consistently chuckle-dusting entertainment, with a gloriously foul-mouthed central performance by Peter Capaldi as Number 10 spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, who ought to feature in the New Year’s Honours List for services to obscene language. Or he should if such awards actually meant anything.

Douglas Haig and the First World War
by JP Harris
Cambridge University Press, £25

AFTER reading about Douglas Haig’s background, character and leadership two things become clear. One was how well British and Empire forces did in spite of him. The other is how accurate his portrayal in Blackadder Goes Forth was.

Falling off the Edge: Globalization, World Peace & Other Lies by Alex Perry
Macmillan, £11.99

ALEX PERRY’S controversial thesis is that progress is inevitably accompanied by violence. Rather than promoting peace, globalization can be blamed for the rising inequality between nations and people. Perry is not the first (and he surely won’t be the last) to suggest that war is the natural flipside to progress and that globalization is essentially Darwinian – “a fight between all mankind to find the fittest of the species” – but in this absorbing account he does make the case rather well.

Constable Portraits: the Painter and his Circle
National Portrait Gallery, London

RENOWNED for his fresh depictions of English landscape of startling originality, John Constable is less well known for his portraits, studies and drawings of his friends, family and members of his circle. Against familiar and iconic images such as The Hay Wain of 1821 – recently voted Britain’s second most revered painting – as the exhibition Constable Portraits reveals, they are less sophisticated, even occasionally naive, and are best approached for what they reveal about the artist’s life rather than examples of portraiture.

Death and the King’s Horseman
National Theatre, London

MYTH tells us who we are — it’s like a magic mirror, highlighting some features, distorting others. It also explains the workings of power. Nobel Prizewinner Wole Soyinka’s 1976 drama, Death and the King’s Horseman, stages the clash between two myths of power, one which represents the indigenous Africans and the other that represents the colonial Europeans.

WORRIED to a frazzle by the deepening recession? Staggering under the weight of global catastrophe from war, disease and environmental chaos? Why not take a mental holiday – a short break to recharge the inner batteries by indulging in some televisual comfort viewing? It seemed like a good idea at the time I tried it out, searching through my copy of the Radio Times for programmes promising to be as sweet and harmless as a kitten in a blanket.