Jonn Elledge

2 weeks ago | jonn.substack.com | Jonn Elledge

Happy weekend, everybody, Jonn here. This is one of those occasional guest posts I publish when a friend has a book out and I suspect that a not inconsiderate number of you would enjoy it. This time, it’s the turn of the historian Rhiannon Garth Jones, whose book All Roads Lead to Rome was published on Thursday. Subhadra Das, author of Uncivilised: Ten Lies That Made The West, described the book as "Authoritative and engaging.

2 weeks ago | jonn.substack.com | Jonn Elledge

This week’s politics-tinged section goes on a bit, so I’m messing with my usual running order. First up, here’s something from the part of my brain that throws up random questions that start with, “Hey, I wonder why-”1One of the strangest things about England, and oh my there are a lot of those to choose from, is its choice of national animal. A lion guards a bridge at Hampton Court Palace; there are four surrounding Nelson in Trafalgar Square.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Jonn Elledge

It takes a big government to admit that it was wrong – or, at the very least, an extremely frightened one. One of the first big policies introduced by Rachel Reeves, less than four weeks after becoming Chancellor, was to change the winter fuel payment, meant to help pensioners heat their homes, from a universal benefit to a means-tested one. Ten months in, it may be her first big U-turn, too. The cut was not ridiculous idea in theory.

3 weeks ago | jonn.substack.com | Jonn Elledge

I am not, at time of writing, in a good place. I say that partly because I’m ill again, with what feels suspiciously like a relapse of whatever godawful gastro thing I had a couple of weeks ago, and the recurrence is vastly more unnerving than the illness itself. More than that, while I have a pretty lovely life by any sensible standard of freelance journalism life1, it remains an inescapable fact that if I don’t work I don’t get paid. Being too ill to think, let alone work, is thus a problem.

3 weeks ago | amyhoggart.substack.com | Amy Hoggart |Jonn Elledge

Subscribe for weekly interviews about left-wing politics! 🧡Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and the author of three books, including the #1 international bestseller A History of the World in 47 Borders. He’s also a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers, and has written more than a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything.