December 2022, Issue 514 Freya Johnston on James Gillray * Griselda Pollock on Hilma af Klint * Carolyne Larrington on the Wife of Bath * Donald Rayfield on the war in Ukraine * Avi Shilon on Benjamin Netanyahu * Charles Shaar Murray on Bob Dylan * Graham Daseler on Hollywood * James Hall on Picasso′s self-portraits * Claire Harman on Katherine Mansfield & the movies * Bernard Porter on the British Empire * Lucy Lethbridge on English food * Tim Stevens on microchips * Charles Foster on the eradication of darkness * Joan Smith on Grenfell * James Purdon on Cormac McCarthy * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
Freya Johnston
James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire
By Tim Clayton
Children do not tend to feature prominently in the satirical works of the ‘Prince of Caricatura’, James Gillray. As someone professionally committed to excoriating the politicians and celebrities of his day, he was paid to train his eye on the grown-ups. One exception to this rule comes in A March to the Bank, a vast, elaborate print of 1787. It was published in the wake of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London and reflects the city’s outrage at the subsequent military crackdown on public disorder. Gillray blends straight portraiture with lurid exaggeration in his etching: an absurdly dandified, impossibly skinny officer goosesteps over a mob of Londoners, who lie crushed and abandoned in various states of disarray. At the centre of the picture, with the officer’s foot daintily poised... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Carolyne Larrington
The Wife of Bath: A Biography
By Marion Turner
How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible? Marion Turner, the newly elected J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford, has avoided ‘second-book syndrome’ with a breathtakingly simple idea: a biography of Chaucer’s most famous character, Dame Alison (or Alice), weaver... read more
Tim Stevens
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
By Chris Miller
In October 2022, the United States Department of Commerce implemented with little warning a set of export control regulations effectively outlawing the export of US semiconductor technology to China. Given China’s reliance on non-Chinese tools, software and facilities in the manufacture of microchips – the silicon semiconductors upon which all information technologies rely – this was potentially a major blow to China’s ambition... read more
Claire Harman
Katherine Mansfield & the movies
One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ‘the driving necessity – the crying need?’ Ambitious, curious, greedy for experience, she became a formidable innovator, reading and borrowing from other authors, adapting techniques from avant-garde painting, music and new media, and trying all the time to make it new. It helped that she was no snob... read more
Lucy Lethbridge
English Food: A People’s History
By Diane Purkiss
What a delectable banquet of a book this is. Diane Purkiss examines how food has created and underpinned the history of the English nation by detailing the slow work of transforming raw ingredients into sustenance. Purkiss divides her book into chapters devoted to broad categories (such as apples, pigs, loaves, fishes, foraging and tinned foods), interspersing these with entertaining and discursive essays on breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. If occasionally the ... read more
Charles Foster
The Darkness Manifesto: How Light Pollution Threatens the Ancient Rhythms of Life
By By Johan Eklöf (Translated from Swedish by Elizabeth DeNoma)
God does not approve of street lighting, observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That wasn’t an oblique aphorism: it was simple biblical exposition. The God of Genesis is famously keen on maintaining boundaries between domains. There is supposed to be light (‘Let there be light’) and darkness (‘He separated the light from the darkness’ and called ‘the light “day”, and the darkness... read more
James Purdon
The Passenger
By Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris
By Cormac McCarthy
At the beginning of The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy seems to have taken a turn for the literal. For nearly six decades, McCarthy’s great twin themes have been the brutality underpinning the American myth of the West and the human longing for salvation in an apparently godless world. Here, then, is the protagonist of his new novel, a professional salvage diver by the name of Robert Western... read more
Most Read
moreCarolyne Larrington
The Wife of Bath: A Biography
By Marion Turner
Howard Davies
Megathreats: The Ten Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
By Nouriel Roubini
Freya Johnston
James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire
By Tim Clayton
Donald Rayfield
New books on the war in Ukraine
James Purdon
The Passenger
By Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris
By Cormac McCarthy
From the Archives
moreFrom the June 2002 issue
A C Grayling
Our Posthuman Future
By Francis Fukuyama
Redesigning Humans
By Gregory Stock
From the July 1999 issue
Jan Morris
View from the Summit
By Sir Edmund Hillary
From the August 1984 issue
Peter Ronnov-Jessen
Interview with J G Ballard
Back Issues
more
November 2022
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