What the critics thought of Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Clive James’s Latest Readings
It was unsurprising that Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, in which the Channel 4 News economics editor predicts seismic change was less than favourably reviewed in the more conservative niches of the press. “I confess to an initial despondency on being asked to review this book,” wrote Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times. “Mason is someone I wouldn’t trust in his analysis of the present, let alone the future.” “Unnervingly dense” and “irritatingly shrill” found Gillian Tett in the Financial Times; “deeply misguided ... utopian folly,” thundered the Telegraph’s Liam Halligan. In the Times, Tim Montgomerie’s imagination ran riot, with “a future police service led by a chief commissioner Mason – kitted out in berets and Che Guevara T-shirts – swarming all over Switzerland.”
Less predictable, however, was the critical kicking Mason got in more progressive publications: the former Labour MP Chris Mullin wrote in the Observer that “although undoubtedly bright, erudite even, he still appears to be shackled to the remnants of a hopelessly impractical ideology”. Even the Socialist Worker was resolutely unimpressed, with Dave Sewell noting that “Paul Mason’s enthusiasm about high-tech work sounds like he has just seen an advert for a job at Google”. Not that all these buckets of cold water seem to bother Mason’s fans: at last glance the book was number seven in the Sunday Times’ bestseller list.
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