Duncan Thompson

Following on from the success of Kamikaze Mouse, the ‘Headteacher Poet’ Duncan Thompson brings you a second collection of poems based on the strange things he’s heard and seen in his own school, as well as the strange things he’s been asked in school assemblies in other schools. Challenged to come up with poems on dead hedgehogs, throwing sweetcorn at people and who is better, Ronaldo or Messi, he triumphed. Could he write poems about a child getting their hand stuck in a watercooler, a school being closed because of a bee invasion, or even about a Vaquita (which research showed was a rare type of dolphin)? Yes, of course he could, and the results are inside this book. Do you want to know what happened when the dinosaurs attacked the school? Would you like to find out what happened to Mary Anning’s dog? Have you heard of the granny who had toothache even though she had no teeth? These mysterious await you inside, and many more!

This is a startlingly frank account of a psychiatrist's and a psychologist's learnings, milestones and mistakes when working with people with the characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD). The book is an examination of the physician and therapist as much as it is of this often alarming and bewildering' group of people. Throughout their illuminating, frank and often moving accounts of their work, Doctors Little and Thomson elucidate and reflect on the principles that inform their practice and the practice of their mental health team colleagues. Importantly, the book also presents stories in their own words from the people with whom they all work. These stories offer further valuable insight into the experience of BPD and its treatment and therapy.

Duncan Thompson provides a concise summary of the hitherto neglected history of New Left Review and its political and intellectual development from 1962 to the present. Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn et al. emerged as the leading figures of a second new left around New Left Review six years after the new left first emerged in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Britain and France's invasion of Suez. Thompson traces NLR's attempts to develop socialist politics, through the 'old' Labour of Harold Wilson, through heady days in 1968, through new Marxist theory, through the Cold War years and into the era of contemporary capitalist globalisation. He surveys the achievements of NLR: a respectable academic reputation has been won, but it has not succeeded in achieving or facilitating the primary goal of the second New Left, that of finding a strategy for transition to socialism.