Many years ago, I periodically visited HMP Grendon Underwood, both a prison and a therapeutic community in the UK, whose governor I knew. In conversations with prisoners, I noticed that they consistently distinguished between “here”—Grendon—and “there”—the System, meaning every other prison, of which they had extensive experience. Grendon was an “oasis”; the System, a “desert”. As Alison Liebling observes in this remarkable book, prisoners can be excellent judges of which environments foster human flourishing and which are merely survivable—or worse. The challenge is to develop meaningful, compelling, and measurable descriptions that allow prisons to be compared and more sustaining environments to be identified and nurtured. This has been the focus of Liebling’s evolving body of research over more than thirty years, characterised by a willingness to draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches within humane inquiry. At the centre of her work is the idea that prisons are mor...
What if Churchill had not been made Prime Minister in 1940? Removed from the field of possibilities, an alternative in Lord Halifax falls into place, and an armistice or peace is signed with Hitler. No one is the wiser that this has taken place, for time has been magically altered. All is different now. This is the possibility that haunts Francis Spufford's latest novel and that its heroine must thwart. Iris is an unlikely candidate as saviour of Britain. She works as a secretary at a stockbroker's, is highly ambitious, wants to be rich, and she labours under an unexplained estrangement from her mother. She likes sex, has multiple male admirers, and is definitely aiming to 'marry up'', curbing her Watford vowels and having a side hustle so she can both dress well and afford to save for an investable nest egg. Yet, she must be careful; she does not want to be caught by a man who might curb her freedom and throttle her ambition. She definitely does not want to fall ...