November 2023, Issue 524 John Adamson on pre-Revolutionary France * Suleika Dawson on John Le Carré * Chris Renwick on the Labour Party * Norma Clarke on Hilary Mantel * Peter Marshall on Britain’s islands * Stewart Wood on inequality * Simon Nixon on the Barclay Brothers * Charles Foster on road ecology * Georgina Adam on art fraud * Caroline Moorhead on Palestine * Florence Hazrat on slang * Joan Smith on the Noughties * John Self on Paul Harding * Guy Stevenson on Benjamín Labatut * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
John Adamson
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
By Robert Darnton
Louis XV had a problem with Paris. Until the late 1740s, he had regularly visited the capital on his way from Versailles to his favourite hunting grounds in the forest of Compiègne. But over the winter of 1749–50 there was a series of kidnappings of street urchins in Paris. By the spring of 1750, rumours were circulating that the capital’s police were complicit in the abductions. By May, lurid stories were doing the rounds that the abducted children were being bled to death so that a member of the royal family with leprosy could bathe in their blood, which was supposedly therapeutic. Riots ensued – one involving a crowd ten thousand strong. Order was restored by the deployment of soldiers... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Peter Marshall
The Britannias: An Island Quest
By Alice Albinia
In July 2023 Orkney Islands Council voted to explore alternative governmental arrangements for the archipelago. One option proposed by the council leader was for it to become a self-governing territory of Norway, the kingdom which lost control of Orkney to Scotland in 1468. The episode – in reality, a smart political stunt in a row over the Scottish government’s transport policy – attracted extraordinary international attention. In the UK press, it was treated with an uneven... read more
Suleika Dawson
The Secret Life of John le Carré
By Adam Sisman
Adam Sisman presents this new book on John le Carré as a ‘secret annexe’ to his earlier biography of the author. Its subject is the women in le Carré’s life – the ones the novelist didn’t marry, that is, but to whom he repeatedly offered the secret parts of himself, which the ones he did marry almost never got to see. It’s only a slim volume, but, as we are so often told, size doesn’t matter if a fellow knows what he is doing. As one of le Carré’s women myself, I feel in a position to take a... read more
Chris Renwick
The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government
By Peter Clark
Age of Hope: Labour, 1945, and the Birth of Modern Britain
By Richard Toye
At the time of writing, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has a lead of more than twenty points over the Conservatives. All the available evidence points towards a Labour victory, potentially one of the most convincing in British history, at the general election that is likely to be held in the next twelve months. Labour and its supporters should... read more
Charles Foster
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
By Ben Goldfarb
When Hazel, the rabbit at the centre of Watership Down, meets his first road, he thinks it is a river. It’s not surprising. Seabirds sometimes crash-land on shiny roads, mistaking them for the ocean. Hazel, when he investigates further, is scared. ‘Now that I’ve learnt about it’, he says, ‘I want to get away from it as soon as I can.’ Ben Goldfarb shares this sentiment. ‘Roads are, you might say, the routes of all evil,’ he declares in this masterly, readable and troubling survey of what... read more
Simon Nixon
You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty – A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession
By Jane Martinson
David and Frederick Barclay were two of the most consequential British business figures of their times. Yet until recently, surprisingly little was known about them, which was exactly how the obsessively secretive and highly litigious twins liked it. That began to change when the family turned their legal guns on themselves. The brothers had fallen out by the time David died in 2021, while later that... read more
Florence Hazrat
Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English
By Valerie Fridland
Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are misplaced – at least according to the linguist Valerie Fridland. Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude does an excellent job of vindicating words and ways of speaking we love to hate. Tracing your ‘verys’ and your singular ‘theys’ across centuries and continents, Fridland offers a... read more
Most Read
moreFlorence Hazrat
Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English
By Valerie Fridland
Saul David
One Fine Day: 29 September 1923 – Britain’s Empire on the Brink
By Matthew Parker
Donald Rayfield
Osip Mandelstam: A Biography
By Ralph Dutli (Translated from German by Ben Fowkes)
Tristia
By Osip Mandelstam (Translated from Russian by Thomas de Waal)
John Adamson
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
By Robert Darnton
Blake Smith
The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs
By David Runciman
From the Archives
moreFrom the March 2020 issue
Peter Conrad
Warhol: A Life as Art
By Blake Gopnik

From the June 1999 issue
Christopher Hitchens
Some Times in America
By Alexander Chancellor

From the June 1989 issue
Hilary Mantel
What am I Doing Here
By Bruce Chatwin

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