Grenfell

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeSteve McQueen has warned that people may be “disturbed” by his new film, Grenfell, which will be shown at London’s Serpentine Gallery next month.The 12 Years a Slave director made the 24-minute film six months after the June 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, in which 72 people died.After garnering the support of the bereaved, survivors and other locals, McQueen took off…

In Hannah Sullivan’s rare, sympathetic, exceptionally readable Was It For This, the sequel to her debut, the TS Eliot prize-winning Three Poems, much of her material seems not to have been expecting to find itself on the page. That is one of its strengths: the sense of details trying to mind their own business being not, after all, skipped – but unexpectedly seen. Holding her son on one hip and noting an outfit outgrown: “His dragon trouser legs,/ green tessellating scales,/ were halfway to the knee, so/ soon they’d be…

Peter Apps’ book about the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent inquiry is an essential work of journalistic scrutiny. The author is deputy editor at Inside Housing and has covered the story meticulously over the past five and a half years. His account is extraordinarily difficult to read, not because his writing isn’t clear and direct throughout – it is – but because Show Me the Bodies is a document not of a tragedy, but of an atrocity.Overnight on 14 June 2017, 72 people – elderly, middle-aged, young, newborn – died…

A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people…