The quest to reconcile quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity has challenged the world’s finest theoretical physicists for decades. While no one has yet succeeded, a possible path is via the theory of ‘loop quantum gravity’. It is the option favoured by Carlo Rovelli, and it provides the backdrop to the broader thoughts he offers here
Henry Salt (1780-1827) served as British Consul-General in Cairo when the nominal Ottoman ruler Muhammad Ali (Mehemet Ali) Pasha – credited as the founder of modern Egypt – was approaching the height of his powers. Salt, the son of a surgeon from Lichfield, had gone to London as a young man and tried, without much […]
Since Frantz Fanon’s death in 1961 at the age of thirty-six, his reputation has passed through several stages. Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who detested the French colonial system that he was born into and which educated him. During the Algerian War of Independence, he took the Algerian side against the French, in the […]
Indira Gandhi was the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. Her Nehru grandfather, Motilal, made his fortune as a brilliant barrister practicing in Allahabad, though the Nehrus were by origin Kashmiri Brahmins who had established them elves in Delhi in the seventeenth century. Intensely Anglophile, Motilal gave his children an […]
‘No one remembers everything about someone,’ writes Hannah Sullivan in Three Poems, an ambitious debut collection of three long poems that map out the attempt to capture distinct memories rising from a mass of impressions. The book opens with ‘You, Very Young in New York’, a pulsing memoir of life in the city, where the […]
The heat and dampness are descending on New Orleans and it is like a Turkish Bath only not as socially inspiring. So I am wondering whether to go East or West. From the look of things generally, one would do well to get clear out of the country and stay out for at least the opening stages of ‘The American Century.’
‘Gentle’ was the epithet most often applied to Shakespeare by his contemporaries. They seem to have meant that he was mild and self-effacing, although some of them no doubt were being sarcastic about a fellow first regarded as an ‘upstart crow’. Ben Jonson, in particular, called his friend and rival ‘gentle’ as part of a […]
In this beautifully observed, lyrical and meticulously researched book, Christian Donlan details his experiences of the unpredictable anatomical ravages that multiple sclerosis (MS) inflicts upon his body and mind. His explorations of his own erratic pathology are informed by his day job as a reviewer of video games for Europe’s largest gaming website. He regards […]
Anyone seriously interested in contemporary Japan, in particular its theatre, cinema and struggles with national identity since the American occupation, will most likely have at some time read Ian Buruma. There are only a few scholars, journalists, critics and commentators writing about Japan in English worth reading, and Buruma is one. So I wondered
When the first reports of the fungus Chalara fraxinea’s arrival in the UK hit the press in 2012, this disease, so deadly to ash trees, became front-page news. Over the past six years, ash dieback, as the disease is also known, has been a regular feature of local newspapers and programmes, having spread all across […]
Mark Cocker is a gifted writer, able to convey vividly and gracefully his vast knowledge of flora and fauna and the passion that they continue to inspire in him. But he is not, as he admits, a polemicist. He cannot do rage; his outrage is of the silent kind. He cannot lash farmers for wrecking […]
Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in New Mexico’s Red River fishing for trout when he first heard the bizarre story at the heart of this unusual and engrossing page-turner. He was using off-the-shelf flies: hooks wrapped in various materials to mimic the often-drab aquatic insects that trout feed on. His guide, Spencer Seim, showed […]
The use of sham books in England has a long history. In a famous satirical description of ‘Leonora’s library’, published in The Spectator in 1711, Mr Spectator writes of his visit to the ‘Lady’s Library’ of a widow named Leonora, ‘formerly a celebrated beauty’ who has subsequently ‘turned all the passions of her sex into […]
Of the twenty or so nonfiction books I have reviewed in the last year, only one or two stick in the memory for the right reasons. They had, for a start, a properly constructed argument or narrative. They were well researched and had something original to say. They complemented this with a lucid writing style. […]
Gamel Abdel Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution (1955) is written in a charismatic style, though it is thin on substance – much like the man who purportedly penned this booklet. What is blatantly clear is Nasser’s belief in the Egyptian army. ‘Throughout my life I have had faith in militarism,’ the Egyptian leader declares. ‘The […]
In Period Piece subtitled A Cambridge Childhood, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter portrayed her family and early years with irresistible wit and her own enchanting drawings. It has been one of my favourite books ever since I first read it as an undergraduate. Almost every day I walked or biked past the home Gwen Raverat described so […]
The Mediterranean was at the heart of the classical world, physically and emotionally. Goods, ideas and people spread across its waters throughout the first millennium BC and long afterwards. Yet we still tend to ignore large parts of this history or abstract it from the stories of these regions before and after the classical era. […]
Today, much of the popular discourse on the Vikings tends to be directed towards the rehabilitation of medieval Europe’s northerly inhabitants as respectable people. In Laughing Shall I Die, Tom Shippey blows this longship out of the water with a thought-provoking and entertaining exploration of the Viking mind-set, which he describes variously as ‘psychopathic’ and […]
In 1991, the dying days of the Soviet Union, a letter arrived at the BBC’s Moscow bureau addressed to me, as the service’s Moscow correspondent, with a startling request. It was from an intrepid Scottish couple who had embarked on a round-the-world trip with their three children in a horse-drawn caravan and planned to cross the Soviet Union
We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s fascinating book is the place to learn. Although he writes with elegance and clarity, his story is a mite intricate. Pay sharp attention, class. The ordoliberals drew […]
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Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
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