Book of the week: Broken Heartlands by Sebastian Payne

An ‘engrossing, warm and insightful’ guide to Labour’s evisceration in its traditional heartlands

Boris Johnson poses with workers during a visit to Wilton Engineering Services
Boris Johnson poses with workers during a visit to Wilton Engineering Services as part of his general election campaign, pictured in November 2019 in Middlesbrough, England
(Image credit: Frank Augstein - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The Great Exhibition of 1851 is often seen as a pivotal moment in British history, when the country fully made the shift to modernity, said Lucasta Miller in the FT. But according to the literary scholar Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, the year was also a “turning point” for Charles Dickens: he argues in this absorbing book that it was when the great Victorian novelist, then in his late 30s, made his defining “creative leap”.

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