Mike Belbin
Latest articles by Mike Belbin
Desire utopia but neglect politics
Mike Belbin remembers Fredric Jameson, April 14 1934-September 22 2024
Breaking free of their mindset
Mike Belbin reviews Percival Everett James, Mantle (panmacmillan.com) 2024, pp320, £20
Raising no questions
Mike Belbin reviews Alex Garland (writer and director) Civil war general release
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