In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial

In her introduction to In Defence of Witches, Mona Chollet discusses historical and contemporary examples of women self-identifying as witches for feminist rather than occult reasons. These include second-wave feminist publications such as the WITCH Manifesto — which is quoted in the book’s epigraph — and Sorcières (‘witches’) magazine.

Surprisingly, she begins with a relatively unknown figure who has since become famous as a fictional archetype: “The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who... inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.” Given the success of the film adaptation of Baum’s book, The Wizard of Oz, Chollet argues that its director, Victor Fleming, “created the first ‘good witch’ in popular culture.”

In Defence of Witches was originally published in French as Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes. Its American edition has a slightly longer subtitle (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial). Two other recent books have reappropriated the word ‘witch’ in both the feminist and occult senses: in Witch, Lisa Lister writes: “Witch... is now being reclaimed”, and in Witches, Sluts, Feminists, Kristen J. Sollée credits Gage as “the first known suffragist to reclaim the word ‘witch’.”

Bimbo:Ditch the Labels. Find Your Voice. Reclaim Your Confidence.

Bimbo, by Ashley James, was published earlier this year. Like Jane Mills in Womanwords thirty years ago, James cites numerous pejorative terms for women (‘bimbo’ of course, but also ‘slut’, and many others), noting how the equivalent male terms are neutral or even positive.

James also discusses the issue of linguistic reclamation: “In recent years, some have begun to reclaim bimbo as a symbol of empowerment — celebrating femininity, self-expresion, and subverting the idea that being hot and clever are mutually exclusive.” But the book — subtitled Ditch the Labels. Find Your Voice. Reclaim Your Confidence. — ultimately argues against reappropriating misogynistic terminology.

James writes that reclaiming pejoratives would be a never-ending battle: “We cannot ever beat these words because if we’re not one, we’re another.” Instead, she advocates autonomy rather than conformity: “I believe in something bigger: the right to live without definition... I want us to break free of the gendered social constraints that aim to keep us compliant.”

500 Must-See Movies

Total Film magazine first published its 500 Must-See Movies special issue in 2017, listing 500 films classified into five genres: horror, science-fiction, thrillers, action movies, and comedies. A second edition was published in 2022, with a handful of changes.

Since then, ‘new’ editions have appeared each year, without any further changes to the selected films. This year’s sixth edition features only one substitution: in the thriller category, Performance has been removed and replaced by a new entry, Oppenheimer.

Empire and Us Weekly magazines have also published top-500 film lists, as did the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers. Empire later revised its list for its Australian edition, and published a collection of 500 five-star reviews. Dateline Bangkok also has its own list of 500 classic films.

Total Film’s previous greatest-film lists are: The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time from 2005, The Top 100 Movies of All Time from 2006, and 100 Greatest Movies from 2010. It also compiled a list of The Sixty-Seven Most Influential Films Ever Made in 2009.

Cunt Is the Word

Anne Kernan’s Cunt Is the Word project began in 2021, when she designed a new image featuring the word ‘cunt’ every day, “using graphic design, photography, photo manipulation and craft.” Last year, Kernan published 102 of those images as a hand-numbered art book in an edition of 100 copies. (Some people may remember that I wrote an extensive cultural history of the c-word, which was online for many years though has been temporarily removed as it was copied without permission.)

Gao Zhen

Artist Gao Zhen, who has been detained in China since returning there from the US in 2024, was subject to a one-day trial on 30th March on charges of defaming Chinese national icons. The trial took place in camera at Sanhe, in Heibei province.

Prosecutors cited three satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong created by Gao. The Execution of Christ is a 2009 installation of seven Mao statues forming a firing squad to shoot Jesus. Mao’s Guilt is a statue of Mao kneeling in repentance, also from 2009. Miss Mao is a bust of Mao with female breasts and a long Pinocchio-like nose, produced in various versions since 2007.

The law Gao has been accused of breaking came into effect in 2018. A Chinese comedy talent agency was fined the equivalent of more than $2 million in 2023 under the same law, after a stand-up comedian made a joke about the Chinese People’s Army.

Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture

Katie Beswick’s Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture, published last year, “offers a personal and cultural history of the word ‘slag’,” the British slang equivalent of ‘slut’. (In fact, ‘slag’ is arguably an even stronger pejorative than ‘slut’, as it implies both promiscuity and worthlessness.)

Beswick discusses female characters in popular culture who have been deemed slags, including the notorious Viz comic strip Fat Slags, which she describes as “a simplistic, stereotypical creation of slag-as-abject.” She also briefly considers the reappropriation of ‘slag’, arguing that this is not yet possible: “We are not at the stage of reclaiming slag... or even being able to weaponise it effectively as resistance — and yet its complexities must be acknowledged in any reckoning with the term.”

Fenian

Fenian, the new album from Irish band Kneecap, will be released on vinyl and CD on 24th April. In an Instagram post on 28th January, the band explained that the album’s title is a reappropriation of a word that has become an anti-Irish pejorative: “Now we’re using it to name everyone speaking truth to power.” The first single from the album, Liar’s Tale, features a blistering criticism of the UK Prime Minister: “fuck Keir Starmer... Better off as compost for farmers”.

A terrorism charge against Kneecap member Mo Chara was dropped last year due to a legal technicality. Paul Goldspring, chief magistrate for England and Wales, dismissed the case on 26th September 2025, noting that his written ruling “is not about the defendant’s innocence or guilt rather only whether this court has jurisdiction to hear the case.” He concluded that the court had no such jurisdiction, as the charge had been filed one day after the six-month statute of limitations had expired: “As such, the proceedings were instituted unlawfully and are null.”

The charge related to a Kneecap concert in London on 21st November 2024, at the O2 Forum Kentish Town during the band’s final show on their Fine Art Tour, when Chara appeared on stage draped in the Hezbollah flag saying: “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group under UK law, and the Metropolitan Police charged Chara with displaying the flag “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation”.

Police also investigated Kneecap’s performance at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, after another band member, Móglaí Bap, called for fans to “start a riot” outside court when Chara’s trial began. After realising that his comments could be construed as an incitement to violence, Bap explained that he wasn’t literally asking people to riot, and Avon and Somerset Police dropped their investigation into the incident.

Get In

Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Get In, published in hardback last year, told the inside story of how Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney (not necessarily in that order) reformed the Labour Party and won the 2024 UK general election. The paperback edition, released last month, includes a new postscript, The Passive Premiership, covering Starmer’s first year in office. (The postscript’s title is taken from a description of Starmer by an unnamed senior government official: “It’s a very oddly passive premiership.”)

Pogrund and Maguire’s post-election verdict is damning: “After fourteen years of estrangement, the Labour Party had reintroduced itself to the people in the worst possible terms. Starmer had promised a politics of service. His first act had been to stamp recklessly over their fragile trust in the state.” They argue that Starmer is disinterested in policy and disengaged from decision making, and they also criticise the presentational errors his government has made.

Starmer’s unwillingness to engage in policy decisions was most damaging when, shortly after the election, Labour announced a plan to means-test the winter fuel allowance for pensioners: “Starmer did not notice the stench of political death.” The plan was eventually reversed, as was a proposal to break a manifesto commitment not to raise income tax. These U-turns created a double whammy: public anger over the initial proposals, followed by press criticism over the policy reversals.

The book highlights the mixed messaging and negativity of Starmer’s speeches, such as when he replaced New Labour’s optimistic Things Can Only Get Better anthem with a downbeat message: “‘Things will get worse,’ he said, ‘before they get better.’” Then there was the misjudged “island of strangers” speech which, in an Observer interview with Tom Baldwin, Starmer later distanced himself from. And in the absence of a Starmer ideology, there were a series of confusing targets: “five missions that became ‘six measurable milestones,’ then ‘three foundations,’ before being abandoned entirely”.

Pogrund and Maguire cite Starmer’s relationship with Donald Trump as one of his few personal achievements: “Trump, despite himself, grew fond of the prime minister.” This had tangible benefits when the US President reduced tariffs on the UK: “no other world leader had been given the preferential treatment Trump extended to Starmer.” (The relationship is now in doubt, after Trump mocked Starmer as “no Winston Churchill” earlier this month.)

The postscript was written before the latest scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson, whom Starmer appointed as his US ambassador and who is now under police investigation. But Get In does include some fascinating background on the subject: “Not a single strategic decision was taken without the Irishman canvassing Mandelson’s view.” The authors make clear that McSweeney (the Irishman) was Mandelson’s protégée, and that Starmer made the ambassadorial appointment on McSweeney’s say so, without even speaking to Mandelson himself, “either before or after his appointment.”

Their conclusion refers back to a key quote from the book’s hardback edition, a metaphor for Starmer’s apparent position as McSweeney’s unwitting puppet: “back on the Docklands Light Railway — the passive prime minister, content to be driven to his destination by strangers who held him in contempt.” That could also be a description of Boris Johnson’s working relationship with Dominic Cummings, and in both cases the relationships ultimately imploded.

Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2025

Tim Benson, Britain’s leading authority on political cartoons, compiled an anthology of Britain’s Best Ever Political Cartoons in 2021. He also edits an annual cartoon compilation, and the most recent edition, Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2025, was published in October last year. (It features cartoons from September 2024 to August 2025.)

The best cartoon in the collection is the one on the cover: a Morten Morland cartoon inspired by James Gillray’s famous satirical print The Plumb-pudding in Danger, which depicted Napoleon and William Pitt literally carving up the globe. In Morland’s version, the two statesmen are replaced by the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. (Morland’s cartoon was first published in The Times on 9th January 2025.)

In his introduction, Benson discusses the Benjamin Netanyahu cartoon that resulted in Steve Bell being fired by The Guardian in 2023, comparing it to the similar circumstances of Gerald Scafe’s dismissal from The Sunday Times a decade earlier. (The two veteran cartoonists, both among the best in the business, each faced accusations of antisemitism following their caricatures of Netanyahu.)

6ixtynin9

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s thriller 6ixtynin9 (เรื่องตลก 69) will be shown at Banban Nannan Library in Nan on 22nd March. In the film, a young woman loses her job and finds ฿1 million in a box outside her door. Like the similar setup in Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (a personal favourite), this unexpected windfall soon leads to unwanted visitors and bodies piling up.

Pen-ek discussed the film in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, explaining how the police department — which dominated the film censorship board when 6ixtynin9 was released — made him add a postscript reassuring viewers that the police were effective at combatting crime: “we were asked by the police to put the rolling credit saying that she was caught and went to jail.” Their justification wasn’t the usual crime-doesn’t-pay moral lesson; instead, it was a face-saving measure by the police: “if the girl could do this, the police look bad.”

6ixtynin9 was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017, and on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority building in 2023. As part of a Pen-ek retrospective in 2018, it was screened on DVD at the Jam Factory and in 35mm at House RCA, and it was also shown at Alliance Française as part of another Pen-ek retrospective that year.

Pen-ek remade 6ixtynin9 as a Netflix series in 2023. In the TV version, the central plotline stuck closely to the film, though there was a new subplot involving a police drugs raid. The film was made, and set, in the aftermath of Thailand’s 1997 economic collapse (known here as the ‘tom yum goong crisis’), and the TV series was filmed shortly after the coronavirus pandemic, which caused similar economic damage. The show also had a political message, and news reports of pro-reform student protests were seen on TV sets throughout the series.