In February 2009, a pair of neuroscientists carried an icebox through gate security at Logan Airport in Boston, under the gaze of a PBS film crew sent to document the event. Bypassing the security scanner so as not to expose the contents of the cooler to radiation, one of the researchers carried the box onto […]
The premise of this polemic is that despite the unprecedented freedoms that women enjoy in the developed world – voting in elections, choosing if and when to have children, adultery without stoning, and divorce without stigma – our culture is still marinated in misogyny. ‘There’s never been a better moment in Western history to be […]
Albert Camus wrote that ‘the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds’. This seems completely sensible and yet many books have a veiled quality to […]
More books on Guantanamo Bay? Surely the subject has been completely covered by now, with Obama in the White House, Afghanistan with the Afghans and austerity posing a threat to our wellbeing in a way that Osama bin Laden (for all the noise of his al-Qaeda gang) never truly did? In his marvellously readable and […]
Reporting how members of the Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101 reacted after committing their first massacre, the historian Christopher Browning has written: They ate little but drank heavily. Generous quantities of alcohol were provided, and many of the policemen got quite drunk. Major Trapp made the rounds, trying to console and reassure them, and again […]
On a Turkish Airlines flight from London to Istanbul my five-year-old son demands to go to the toilet – ‘Now!’ Recognising the urgency in his tone, I spring to my feet and grab him, not realising in my haste that I have left the book I have been reading on an empty seat, face up. […]
Balloonophiles must nurse a particular affection for Wolverhampton, for it was from there that, on 5 September 1862, one of the most celebrated ascents began. The pilots were James Glaisher, secretary to the Royal Meteorological Society, and Henry Coxwell, whose claim to scientific knowledge derived from his former career as a dentist, but who was […]
Woody Allen, in Love and Death, speculated that Napoleon, fearful of the threat of Beef Wellington, was striving to perfect some piece of imperial patisserie – ‘more cream!’ – that would carry the day. After reading E C Spary’s Eating the Enlightenment, I reckon that Waterloo boiled down to coffee drinkers versus tea drinkers. And […]
There is a once lovely square at the back of Paddington Station now comprised entirely of budget hotels. I missed the last train home last week and after drawing a few blanks secured a single room in one of these for £60. I didn’t expect much at that price, not in London. Nor was it. […]
Who was John Hayward, and does he deserve a full-length biography, readers may ask? The first answer is that Hayward, who died in 1965 at the age of sixty, was a disabled bookman who created a South Kensington salon centred on T S Eliot in the 1930s, and shared a Chelsea flat with Eliot from […]
At 192 pages this book contains more or less enough poems to be these days accounted the lifetime’s work of a poet. Those here, retrieved after R S Thomas’s death from the airless columns of long-dead magazines, are not quite the harvest of the wastepaper basket, but not one of them has been published in […]
For a long time, the accepted wisdom on Albert Camus’s response to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) has been that he was a coward. This was the view first promulgated by his former friend and rival Jean-Paul Sartre, who accused Camus of having the ‘morality of a boy scout’ for refusing to praise the […]
Over the last decade or so, Italo Calvino has faded somewhat from the very front rank of the contemporary literary pantheon, his reputation no longer as glittering as it once was, when Salman Rushdie and Gore Vidal sang his praises and he seemed almost to rival Borges as a literary fantasist and inventor. In the […]
In 1884, 282 hibernating bumblebees travelled on a ship from London to New Zealand. Only 48 survived the journey. Those were the first bumblebees to take flight in the country. They had been shipped over at the request of British settlers, who needed British insects to pollinate the red clover imported from their homeland. Nearly […]
George Monbiot is never afraid to say what he thinks, and we should admire him for this, even when on occasion we disagree with him. And to be fair, as I read Feral I found much I both agreed with and admired. What first struck me – and this may come as a surprise to […]
In 1832, while HMS Beagle was anchored off San Salvador, Brazil, Charles Darwin went ashore to explore. There he saw rocks that glittered, as if burnished, in the sun. Darwin hypothesised that the shining was caused by a thin coating of metallic oxides but could not account for how it had been made. The strange […]
Nobody could have seen it coming. That was the get-out-of-jail-free card played by bankers and banking watchdogs alike in the wake of the credit crisis that brought the global financial system to its knees. Yet that protestation actually convicts the financial community rather than excuses it. Nobody could have seen it coming because nobody had […]
This book has the shape of a mountain: you tramp up one side, looking at the preparation and run-up to the ‘battle’ for nearly two hundred pages, spend fewer than sixty on the Bretton Woods conference itself and then tramp down for another hundred, as Benn Steil considers the aftermath to the present. It could […]
Winston Churchill, as chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, asserted the right of the citizen ‘so to arrange his affairs as not to attract taxes enforced by the Crown so far as he can legitimately do so within the law’. Most people who are in a position to do any tax planning today would […]
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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner