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Such a fun read! Action-packed, almost breathlessly so, with much less of the exposition that I think slowed down the later novellas, still plenty of humour, but also deeper relationship-building. Murderbot (aka 'SecUnit', when it wants to be less, I don't know, murderey) remains easily the most relatable character in today's fiction.

Murderbot being endlessly relatable, as usual

TBH I'd be hard pushed to say I enjoyed this. It's the first time I've read anything in Middle English (though my understanding is that it's closer to Early Modern than, say, Chaucer) and it felt like a bit of a slog. Glad I've read it, but even more glad I've finished it!

A cunning plan that, remarkably, worked!

Worth reading for the first chapter alone, which plots Starmer's move from a remarkably left-wing lawyer (I had no idea he was involved in the McLibel case, for example) to a marked authoritarian, starting with his involvement in Northern Ireland and ramping up during his time as DPP. How you feel about the second chapter probably depends a lot on how you feel about Lexit, though arguably there are patterns emerging here that remain through the rest of Starmer's career. The remainder of the book covers the period of Starmer's rise to leader of the party, and really continues the theme of moving towards greater authoritarianism and watering down any left-wing policies. Eagleton is obviously not a fan, and that rather mars much of the book, but the first chapter is pretty breathtaking as a character study.

Some fun stuff in here, but it felt too much like a random collection of just anything related to either Dracula or Transylvania.

Good on assessing/criticizing 'green growth', left-accelerationism, SDGs, and the like. Also good on discussing Japanese thinkers and whether Japan's lost decade(s) count as degrowth. Gets a bit bogged down in analyzing whether Marx was leaning away from productivism in his later years, based on reading his unpublished notebooks. Sketches out a pretty plausible model for what degrowth communism could look like, but then gets a bit wrapped up in Chenoweth's 3.5% as all we need to achieve our ends :(