"We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that's why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world. In The Revolutionists (Bodley Head), Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green communist rather than Islamist. It's a geopolitical period piece:"
"The Alienation Effect (Allen Lane) a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain's shores in the middle of the last century. We already know the assimilated conservatives Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper but Hatherley gives us the forgotten radicals who put concrete into our skyline and shook us out of our complacency. Not everyone thanked them. Ian Fleming famously avenged brutalism by naming a Bond villain after one of its apostles, the Jewish architect Erno Goldfinger."
Contemporary life feels intensely political but lacks mass revolutionary action, favoring symbolic protests over sustained upheaval. The 1970s embodied a moment when political convictions produced tangible, often violent, change across the Middle East. Mid-century architectural émigrés from Mitteleuropa reshaped Britain with brutalist concrete, unsettling complacency and provoking both admiration and backlash. The Intercontinental in Kabul exemplified a cosmopolitan social life that later became a fortified site during conflict, while the Afghan people display persistent exuberance and resilience despite invasion and civil war. National introspection and global ideological shifts continue to shape historical memory and urban landscapes.
#hyper-political-activism #1970s-middle-east-radicalism #brutalist-architecture #afghanistan-resilience
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]