April 2023, Issue 517 Kirsten Tambling on Juliet through the ages * Richard Vinen on the plot to kill Thatcher * John Kampfner on the GDR * Simon Heffer on Noël Coward * Salley Vickers on occult art * Howard Davies on inflation * Alan Ryan on equality * Dan Saladino on food and the environment * Iain Bamforth on Nietzsche's alpine getaway * Rob Doyle on porn * Tess Little on Annie Ernaux * Jane O'Grady on Derek Parfit * D J Taylor on England and Englishness * Will Wiles on architecture * Benjamin Hutchinson on Hermann Burger * Michael Delgado on Max Porter * Kate McLoughlin on Isabella Hammad * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
Kirsten Tambling
Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine
By Sophie Duncan
In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers … to leane over’. England’s introduction to the balcony came over a decade after the first performance of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet. When it was staged in the summer of 1596, just before London’s playhouses were closed owing to a resurgence of plague, the exchange now universally known as the ‘balcony scene’ was probably transacted at a window opening onto the backstage... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Richard Vinen
Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown
By Rory Carroll
On a cross-Channel ferry at the start of her honeymoon, my mother met Clement Attlee. In those innocent days, there was nothing odd about a former prime minister exchanging a few words with a stranger as the two of them queued for a cup of tea and a rock bun. Some ministers were protected but no one took the process very seriously. When he was home secretary in the mid-1960s, Roy Jenkins suggested that the uniformed policeman who was... read more
Simon Heffer
Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward
By Oliver Soden
The subtitle of Oliver Soden’s biography of Noël Coward suggests that the reader will be presented with versions of Coward and be talked through each. This reader could discern only one life: that of performer. Although he made the occasional departure from the world of greasepaint – such as when he worked for the government before and during the Second World War – his life was basically one massive act of self-reinvention from struggling actor living with... read more
Tess Little
Look at the Lights, My Love
By Annie Ernaux (Translated from French by Alison L Strayer)
Visiting a new supermarket is a disorienting experience. On the surface, it’s all familiar: the sliding doors, the black rubber conveyor belts, the flecked linoleum. But then you can’t find the baskets, you’re in the wrong queue, you’re not in a queue, you can’t enter this queue with a trolley. As the familiar slips, you become uncomfortably aware of the unspoken rules you might be transgressing. After all, you entered the supermarket as a customer and must... read more
John Kampfner
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990
By Katja Hoyer
I was asking my father for a bit of help with my homework, sticking newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook. He was flabbergasted when he saw that the subject was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the event in 1954 which marked the end of the French presence in Indochina. It was just over twenty years later, as the Americans were retreating from Saigon. I was studying the French withdrawal from its colonies as history whereas he felt he was still living through it. I had the same... read more
Howard Davies
We Need to Talk about Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years
By Stephen D King
From the global financial crisis of 2008–9 until not so long ago, central banks ruled the world. Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, regularly appeared together in the Forbes list of the top ten most powerful people in the world, alongside Vladimir Putin and the Pope. That is not the case today. The successors to those masters of ... read more
Ben Hutchinson
Brenner
By Hermann Burger (Translated from German by Adrian Nathan West)
On 28 February 1989, a matter of days after the publication of what he had described as the first volume of a tetralogy, the Swiss writer Hermann Burger kept a long-held promise and killed himself. The world could not say it had not been warned: from his first novel, Schilten (1976), about a school teacher who prepares his pupils for death, to his collection of aphorisms Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), a gathering of over a thousand... read more
Most Read
moreLucy Moore
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
By Nandini Das
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History
By Peter Frankopan
Rob Doyle
Porn: An Oral History
By Polly Barton
John Kampfner
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990
By Katja Hoyer
Richard Vinen
Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown
By Rory Carroll
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
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