Sally Campbell

A couple of weeks after all the furore surrounding its unveiling, I made my way to Newington Green to see the Mary Wollstonecraft statue for myself. It was smaller than I expected, no bigger than a person standing on a plinth. The bulk of it is a silvery, writhing, lumpy mass, reaching upward, with a tiny, nude, pert-breasted homunculus emerging from the top, like the Silver Surfer but with more pubic hair. My immediate reaction was a mixture of amusement and perplexity. What was I to take from this about the 18th century radical and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?

There is a moment about half way through this panic-inducing film, where Howard Ratner’s (Adam Sandler) soon-to-be-ex-wife stares him in the face coldly and says, “I think you’re the most annoying person on the planet. I hate being with you, I hate looking at you, and if I had my way, I would never see you again.”

It’s funny because it takes you out of the film for a moment, to acknowledge that this is, indeed, how you normally feel about Adam Sandler.

But his performance in this relentlessly stressful tale about a needy, creepy, diamond dealer in New York is spot on.

There is a moment about half way through this panic-inducing film, where Howard Ratner’s (Adam Sandler) soon-to-be-ex-wife stares him in the face coldly and says, “I think you’re the most annoying person on the planet. I hate being with you, I hate looking at you, and if I had my way, I would never see you again.”

It’s funny because it takes you out of the film for a moment, to acknowledge that this is, indeed, how you normally feel about Adam Sandler.

But his performance in this relentlessly stressful tale about a needy, creepy, diamond dealer in New York is spot on.

The devastating blow of last month’s general election defeat will be hard for Labour activists and all those who willed a Corbyn victory to get over.

A battle for interpretation began immediately after the exit poll, with Parliamentary Labour Party figures leaping onto our screens to tell us Corbyn was entirely to blame. But, as Joseph Choonara shows in this issue, the problems for Labour date back to the Blair years.

This year Graffiti has appeared on walls from Hong Kong to Santiago reading, “We won’t return to normality, because normality was the problem.”

As a slogan it expresses well the predicament of the moment. For the past decade “normality” has meant misery for millions of people across the globe, as working class people and the poor were made to pay for the last economic crisis.

For those of us who were involved in the anti-war movement that developed in response to George W Bush’s “war on terror” after 9/11, The Report is a startling reminder of why it was so important.

Unbelievable is a quietly devastating drama based on the true story of an 18 year old woman who in 2008 reported to police that she had been raped at knife-point by an intruder, only to be disbelieved and eventually even charged with wasting police time.

Unlike too many other crime dramas, there is no glamorisation of brutal sex crimes and serial predators here. Unbelievable focuses instead on the trauma suffered by the young woman, Marie Adler (played by Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever) and other victims of what turns out to be a serial rapist.

The global climate strike on Friday 20 September surpassed all expectations. Greta Thunberg has estimated there were over 4 million protesting worldwide, from Europe to America, to Kenya, to the Pacific Islands.

In Britain there were perhaps 350,000 on the streets, including 100,000 in London and tens of thousands across Scotland.

This puts the day on a par with the 15 February 2003 protests against the Iraq invasion and the global women’s marches in 2017, with the notable difference that the climate strike was the only one of those to take place on a weekday.

Boris Johnson’s apparently sudden decision to close down parliament for five weeks as Britain approaches the Brexit deadline provoked outrage from (almost) all quarters.

Primarily interpreted as a manoeuvre to prevent MPs stopping a no deal Brexit, the “proroguing” has also been decried as an affront to democracy. Both are true.

The Financial Times is so dismayed by Johnson’s suspension of democratic processes that it has come as close as it is ever likely to to backing Jeremy Corbyn for prime minister:

Set amid the slate-filled landscape of mid-19th century Snowdonia, this gothic tale of black-hearted capitalism features powerful performances from Eleanor Worthington-Cox and Maxine Peake.

It is a powerful story of grief, adolescence, suspicion and superstition that builds an atmosphere of intense dread, broken only by the realisation that the truth of industrialisation is more brutal than anything young Gwen (Worthington-Cox) can conjure in her imagination.