CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Valedictory venom for Paul Dacre, shill supreme of Daily Fail's grate journalism
On the way out: Paul Dacre
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Retirement at last for Paul Dacre,
Friend of boss, red-faced bigot, strikebreaker,
The old and the stale,
In what some call the Mail,
And I call the Malady Maker.
GREAT journalists can inform, educate and inspire. The writings of Paul Foot and John Pilger, to name but two, have illuminated my life. Bad journalists — almost inevitably boring, slavish, brown-nosing toadies of right-wing proprietors and editors — are a sad fact of life and one of many reasons for the decline of newspaper sales.
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