iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

All in all, an oustanding achievement that should be on plenty of best-of-the-year lists come the autumn.

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The resulting feelings of aggressive displacement have been insufficiently documented. Keshed not only documents them, it articulates why those feelings are more than just nostalgia. There's so much more to the novel than that, but that idea stuck with me long after I'd finished.

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In recent years, our industrial cities – none more so than Leeds – have been built over with shopping centres and high-rise apartment blocks that are unaffordable to the people who used to live there.

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Hennigan’s ability to connect the lone person with the social context explains the praise from publications like the Times Literary Supplement.

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the relationship with his family, which buckled under the pressures of capitalism. It’s about an individual who struggled after as the first in his family to have gone into higher education. Behind that, it’s the story of the disappearing social structures that held working-class lives together.

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Keshed, his first novel, is part experimental fiction, part kitchen-sink romance, part addiction story – and a unique account of the unmaking of the British working class. It tells the story of a dying man reviewing the wreckage of his past life and...

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Hennigan grew up in a working-class Yorkshire family, and lives in Leeds. He’ll be known to many readers as the author of Ghost Signs, a lauded memoir about his time delivering food parcels during the pandemic

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It took a while to digest Keshed by @stuhennigan.bsky.social , because it's such a big, powerful and important novel. Apart from anything else, it brings home how xlass works on you internally and externally, a combination of feeling and material conditions.

The jacket of Stu Hennigan's novel Keshed

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Yes absolutely. And lots of the Reform party’s actual policies are expensive throwbacks to big protectionist state policies from the 50s-70s period - while also promising spending cuts of course.

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Fair enough but some EU countries have had neoliberal policies. The original question tho was whether there was evidence to say neoliberalism leads to fascism generally, not just in the US. I can see how that argument makes sense there .

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You could make an argument that European neoliberalism has spurred the hard right in that it allows parties to play to an older demographic’s memories of bigger, more protective states. That happens (in different ways) in Hungary and the UK for example. Tho the uk hasn’t had a fascist government.

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If we can take a nation state at the basic unit we’re measuring, would you count both an elected government and the presence of fascist activists as examples of state being fascist?

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

If you were looking for evidence that neoliberalism necessarily leads to fascism, wouldn’t you need more examples?

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Intetesting read, thank you. Always good to see that despite all the theorising that goes around around social media etc, old fashioned word of mouth still works

I sometimes wonder if, when someone finds an old coin, say a Roman one, are they first person to touch it since the last Roman person it? Is there a corresponding Roman person 2000 years ago going “Damn, I’ve lost that sodding aureus.”?

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Reading this has been like someone turning a light on, as I just haven’t been able to understand how my daughter’s university reading works. Thank you.

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How would one show original thinking in, say, physics though? Most exams reward memory and certain ways of thinking, which is why so many intelligent people fail them.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

I genuinely don’t understand the logic of this response. Surely firing missiles is not a threat but an action?

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Not enough books about darts. Thank you Kit Fielding, I’m going in 🎯

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

You’s be welcome over at the Bee Gayla 🐝🐝🐝🐝

The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Admission to this online event is free, and you’re hereby invited. To obtain your ticket and a link via Eventbrite, see link here We can’t wait to meet you there, at this our first online event! Do please swarm along 🐝 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝 www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launc...

eventbrite.co.uk

Book Launch: Chopsy: The Resistance Tales of a Working Class Woman

Join The Bee for an online book launch for Maya Jordan's debut memoir.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

The Bee is hosting an online launch event for Chopsy, with @clairemalcolm, publisher of The Bee and CEO of New Writing North, in conversation with Maya Jordan, and questions from the audience to follow. The event takes place at 7.30pm on Wednesday 25 March 2026.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Very pleased to read this Vicky

The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

I will not lie, it was new to me.

The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Growing up in a working-class family in Newcastle, David Olusoga experience devastating economic decline, and racism. Yet he "rejected his rejection", and has come to love his home region, as he explain in an essay in The Bee: thebeemagazine.com/david-olusog...

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

For the Bee he's written Sticker Upper, a short story set in Cardiff in the late 90s. It is a terrific evocation of time /place, and a depiction of the challenges of young manhood. And it’s a reminder that not everyone spent the 1990s drinking cappuccino and/or listening to Britpop in Camden.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

To write about working-class lives and working-class experience, many writers need to invent a working-class form and style. @dantyte.bsky.social, documenting life in his native South Wales, does just that, with taut, pared-back language that complements his characters’ focus on self-preservation.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Quite rightly singled out by the Observer as one of the best debuts of 2026 – an empathetic evocation of the experience of learning disability, and a brilliant new voice for non-gentrified east London. Read our interview with Lucy Apps here: thebeemagazine.com/lucy-apps-ou...

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Our interview with the poptastic memoirist Adelle Stripe, who asked if we could begin with some Smash Hits type questions as well as literary ones is here: thebeemagazine.com/adelle-strip...

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

In the 2000s I was asked to put together a panel gathered by a European phone network to predict what uses cameras on phones might be out to. We had successful artists, analysts, commentators etc, but looking back, the person who predicted how they'd be used was a 16 year old girl from Brixton.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Pagers being used to organise warehouse parties and raves in the 1980s and 1990s?

The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

The difficulties with Starmer identifying as working class are obvious, but it’s interesting that the biggest objectors are clearly middle class right wing journalists. Most seems incapable of understanding you might base your identity on things other than job & money.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

“Wuthering Heights is a story by and about people from below,” writes Richard Benson in a a short history of adaptations of the book. “Millions have identified with it as such for 150 years. Fennell's version takes the pretty bits, and made them into a film for people from above.” bit.ly/wh26x

thebeemagazine.com

“Wuthering Heights” Review: Problems Aren’t Only About Race and Class

The problem with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights run deeper than its awful casting.

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Seeing a possible Gruffalo scenario here

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The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I’ve never heard this before and it’s beautiful. Music for a Large Ensemble sounds perfect today in the cold sunshine

The Bee @beelitmag.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I love photography work in which the photographer makes themselves parrndo the story, rather than just being the detached eye

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His argument is that up to ww1 the church had more credibility do could call on the king/country model. After ww1, when churches of all countries were blessing the guns, a new idea/image of nationhood was needed & found in “the people”.

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Yes it does have that, and the identity is defined in opposition to an invasion. But there is also the imagining of the industrial working class as the backbone of the nation - in contrast to the ww1-era patriotism which was about doing your duty to king and country.

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In Richard Weight’s book Patriots he makes a very good analysis of how the current version of patriotism we live with now was devised and sold in World War 2. Most of what you’re saying follows from that. It’s worth reading just for that first section.

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