Reviews

Many people assume that scientific racism and eugenics were dealt a death blow at the end of the Second World War when the nature and scale of horrifying Nazi atrocities were revealed. But Angela Saini destroys that myth in the most forensic of fashions.

First, she shows the extent to which the Nazis were foreshadowed by top British academics who sought justification for slavery, and later colonisation, in theories of racial hierarchy.

Eliza Gearty’s debut novel is vivid and utterly engaging, grabbing you from the very first page and pulling you up and down Glasgow’s sandstone tenement flats, into living rooms filled with clouds of tobacco and along the city’s iconic streets.

The book is loosely based on Gearty’s own experiences as a door-to-door fundraiser, and is told through the character, Emma. Emma works for a homelessness charity and, like many fundraisers, and until only recently, a sharply rising number of the population, is employed on a zero-hour contract.

My sex education, like many of my peers, was limited. Conversations were hushed, lessons were focused on contraception and how to prevent pregnancy, and there was little discussion about sexuality, gender and the importance of giving consent.

Natalie Fiennes provides a daring and radical, if at times somewhat jumbled, overview of how sex education is “outdated and ripe for transformation”, confirming what many have said for too long.

A few weeks ago, we started the Biology unit in science. My teacher gave us a brief on the topic we would focusing on: Maintaining Biodiversity. She warned us that this was the topic that people scored lowest on in exams, which drew my attention to parallels outside of school, in the real world (shock!).