The Battle For Britain with John Clarke (Part 1)

John Clarke's 'The Battle For Britain: Crises, Conflicts and the Conjuncture' offers a wide-ranging conjunctural analysis of the forces shaping contemporary Britain, with particular attention to Brexit. Drawing on cultural studies, social policy and history, Clarke triangulates Britain's relations with Europe, Empire and America and maps intersecting temporalities such as the Anthropocene, colonial legacies and neoliberal transformations. The book emphasizes the overdetermined yet underdetermined nature of conjunctures and seeks to recover multi-dimensional accounts against monocausal explanations. Clarke blends personal reflection, interdisciplinary reading and political commentary to trace how nationalism, neoliberal failures, and social contestations produce the current conjuncture. The work is written to provoke collective discussion about politics and strategy on the left, as well as to clarify analytic tools for understanding contemporary crises.

Co-authored by John Clarke and colleagues, 'Making Policy Moves' investigates how social policies are moved, adapted and reinterpreted across different national and local contexts. The book challenges simplistic accounts that see policy either as nationally contained or entirely global, instead highlighting relational and translational processes. It draws on case studies to show how policies are reworked through local institutional practices, actor networks and cross-border influences. The authors argue for analytic frameworks that capture the relational production of places and policy, inspired by geographies of social policy. The work contributed to Clarke's broader interest in triangulating Britain and thinking relationally about space and policy.

In 'Age of Anger', Pankaj Mishra examines the rise of nationalist, isolationist, and chauvinist movements by tracing the historical impact of Enlightenment values such as individualism and capitalism. He argues that these movements are a response to the unfulfilled promises of modernity, leading to widespread anger and resentment. The book offers a profound critique of modern liberalism and its global implications.