Mike Belbin

Latest articles by Mike Belbin

Cancelling the dead

Eric Gill’s Prospero and Ariel has been vandalised yet again. Mike Macnair looks at the politics of attacking soft targets

Master of ‘artistic subversion’

Obituary: Jean-Luc Godard, December 3 1930-September 13 2022

Modernisation with typical characteristics

Is the People’s Republic of China really such an odd social formation? Mike Belbin finds the answer in history

Rubbish tip of a world

Bong Joon-ho (director) 'Parasite' 2019, general release.

Future and present

John Lanchester 'The wall' Faber and Faber, 2019, pp288, £14.99. Bernardino Evaristo 'Girl, woman, other' Hamish Hamilton, 2019, pp464, £16.99.

Explorations of inequality

Andrea Levy: March 7 1956 - February 14 2019

Art for our class

Mike belbin reviews Christine Lindey Art for all: British socially committed art from the 1930s to the cold war Artery Publications, 2018, pp240, £25

Review: 22 July, directed by Paul Greengrass

Out on general release and Netflix

Movement we need to build

Review of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, on general release

Chronicler of consumer culture

Tom Wolfe, March 2 1930 - May 14 2018

And the world we live in?

Mike Belbin reviews: Civilisations Thursdays, 9pm, BBC2 - all episodes available on the BBC iPlayer

The social gradient

Mike Belbin completes his series of articles on genetics, racism and human character

Heritability - biological and social

In the third article of a four-part series Mike Belbin discusses ‘inherent character’. Today this is no longer ascribed as racial, but is put down to a person’s genes

Racialism and eugenics

In the second article in a four-part series Mike Belbin looks at the many and varied classifications of race

Born loser: is destiny biological?

Did the notion of biological superiority bite the dust following the racism of the Nazis? In this first article in a four-part series, Mike Belbin traces the reformulation of an ancient idea of human character

Alienation and augmented humanity

Mike Belbin reviews: 'Ghost in the Shell' Rupert Sanders (director), general release

What will be will be

Michel Houellebecq, Submission, (Translated from the French by Lorin Stein) William Heinemann, 2015, pp256, £18.99

Dealing with the legacy

Artist and empire: facing Britain’s imperial past Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1; ends April 10

Abyssinia and the myth of appeasement

Eighty years ago, fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia. Mike Belbin argues that this event is the key to understanding the international politics of the 1930s and after

Their culture and ours

Exhibition What is luxury? Victoria and Albert Museum, until September 27 2015