July 2019, Issue 477 Alexandra Gajda on Queen Elizabeth's banker * John Gribbin on the approaching Novacene * Felipe Fernández-Armesto on Thomas Harriot * Gillian Moore on Alma Mahler * James Delbourgo goes swimming * Ian Critchley on Howard Jacobson * Miranda France on Joanna Kavenna * David Blackbourn on culture in the Third Reich * John Keay on India in the Persianate Age * Edward Vallance on Charles I's killers * Peter Conrad on Pavarotti * Sam Leith on Mick Herron * Arabella Byrne on Lisa Taddeo * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
John Vidal
The Air Pollution Epidemic
Something changed in around 2012. People started talking about the air. Perhaps they heard their children wheezing, or granny told them she couldn’t climb the stairs, or they were fed up with having constant headaches. China woke up when the city of Beijing had to shut half its factories to make sure its coal-polluted air was safe enough for Olympic athletes to breathe. Two years later the great Sahara dust episode was the alarm call in Britain. After weeks of choking on traffic fumes, Londoners found their cars covered in a fine red dust. The prime minister, David Cameron, said it was fine because the pollution was natural, but nobody believed him and news desks at last started to tease out the biggest public health scandal of the past fifty years. And what a scandal! The scale of this modern plague, we have begun to see, is staggering. We have long known that nearly three million people in poor countries die prematurely each year from... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Alexandra Gajda
Gresham’s Law: The Life and World of Queen Elizabeth I’s Banker
By John Guy
To his 19th-century biographer J W Burgon, the Tudor merchant, banker and diplomat Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–79) was one of the heroic worthies of the 16th century, embodying the spirit of that transitional epoch, when ‘England was raised to that proud eminence in the scale of nations which she has ever since maintained’. The appeal of Gresham to the Victorians is obvious: the... read more
James Delbourgo
Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool
By Annie Kelly (Photography by Tim Street-Porter)
The Swimming Pool in Photography
By Francis Hodgson (ed)
By suspending the normal rules of earth-bound weight and motion, swimming pools bend certain rules of mental operation too, presenting possibilities for divine transformation and fatal transgression. Their creative potential often takes perverse and sometimes... read more
Edward Vallance
Regicides on the Run: what became of those who ordered the execution of Charles I
The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of interest in recent years. No fewer than three popular history books have tackled their adventures in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the past... read more
Gillian Moore
Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler
By Cate Haste
Alma tell us,/All modern women are jealous,/Which of your magical wands/Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz? So runs the chorus of Tom Lehrer’s witty 1965 ballad about Alma Mahler, widow of three artistic luminaries (the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel) and ... read more
Arabella Byrne
Three Women
By Lisa Taddeo
Like any landscape after a flood, everything looks different since the advent of the #MeToo movement. Contours have shifted, new lines have been drawn. Of course, changes were afoot long before Harvey Weinstein was smoked out of his Hollywood penthouse. Fourth-wave feminism has been in the ascendant for some years now, making... read more
Sam Leith
Joe Country
By Mick Herron
Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is routinely and predictably compared with Le Carré, and it’s a comparison that both holds up very strongly and doesn’t hold up at all. It holds up strongly in the... read more
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