November 2024, Issue 535 Freya Johnston on Handel’s Messiah * Nicholas McDowell on John Milton * Fiona Sampson on Syliva Plath * D J Taylor on Tom Sharpe * Richard Vinen on Boris Johnson * Pratinav Anil on the ruling class * Bijan Omrani on women in the ancient world * Nicholas Rankin on Oxford at war * Howard Davies on Germany’s economic miracle * Alex de Waal on Ethiopia * David Abulafia on El Cid * Altair Brandon-Salmon on Mies van der Rohe * Ian Fraser on Credit Suisse * Frances Cairncross on the care crisis * Zoe Guttenplan on Ali Smith * Stevie Davies on Andrew Miller * D D Guttenplan on Nick Harkaway * Jeremy Wikeley on Jonathan Coe * Sam Reynolds on Samantha Harvey * Eleanor Baker on book curses * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
Freya Johnston
The Making of Handel's Messiah
Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing. Circling around the redemptive power of Christ, it combines declarations with questions, prophecies, injunctions and exhortations (‘Who is this King of Glory?’, ‘Behold, I tell you a Mystery’, ‘Daughter of Sion, shout’, ‘He shall speak’). Full of urgency, tribulation and momentum, the Messiah nevertheless lacks a plot – unless we class the perennial human emotions of hope and fear, and the movement between the two, as dramatic action. The oratorio is sometimes described as a commentary, but it is a compilation of sources... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Fiona Sampson
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath
By Peter K Steinberg (ed)
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status. In reality, of course, it does no such thing... read more
David Abulafia
El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary
By Nora Berend
Among medieval heroes, El Cid has proved the most durable. There is no doubt that he, unlike King Arthur, existed; it is certain that he gained control of Muslim Valencia at the end of the eleventh century. Nor is there any doubt that he was a member of the Castilian lesser nobility and had a wife named Jimena... read more
Howard Davies
Kaput: The End of the German Miracle
By Wolfgang Münchau
Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I mean to say by that, of course, is that I have often found him supporting my own views and prejudices in language rather more persuasive... read more
D D Guttenplan
Karla’s Choice
By Nick Harkaway
In May 1966, an aggrieved John le Carré wrote to the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in response to a critical review. Noting that his books were at that point unavailable in the Soviet Union, he set out his stall for the benefit of (sadly imaginary) Russian readers: ‘I have equated, in hypothetical terms, the conduct of East and West... read more
Nicholas McDowell
What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
By Orlando Reade
While Shakespeare seems to maintain the status of perennial contemporary, Milton does not enjoy quite the same standing. The knotty theological wrangling and offensively strict gender hierarchies of Paradise Lost, not to mention the obtrusive and rebarbative personality of its author, make it an ever-harder sell... read more
Nicholas Rankin
Oxford’s War 1939–1945
By Ashley Jackson
It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes how the city of dreaming spires woke up to the realities of the Second World War. His trawl through the archives has yielded a rich and glittering haul, containing much... read more
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‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: