In Morocco during the French protectorate, mixed-race marriages were viewed with revulsion by polite colonial society. It’s little wonder, then, that the mixed-race family at the heart of The Country of Others are such a dyspeptic bunch. When the book opens, in the 1940s, Amine Belhaj is an aspiring fruit grower and self-taught botanist tasked […]
David Keenan’s fifth novel, Monument Maker, may be construed as a monument in its own right, aspiring to timelessness – a vast, often bewildering store of memories and narratives ranging across different periods and landscapes. Keenan, we are told, spent a decade writing the book, and the result is a text of colossal ambition. At […]
Once Hector was dead, there was no hope for the Trojans. In the closing scenes of Homer’s Iliad, the warrior’s widow, mother and sister-in-law pine over his battered corpse before it is consigned to the flames and envisage further miseries before them. ‘I do not think he will reach his teenage years,’ says Andromache of […]
The poems in Selima Hill’s Men Who Feed Pigeons are between two and twelve lines in length – typically they are four – and are about men but rarely about pigeons. In the opening section, alphabetically arranged, from ‘The Anaesthetist’ down to ‘The Uncle’, they take the form of small self-contained narratives. Poems like ‘The […]
Thirty years ago, Russia’s archives opened their doors to any plausible enquirer. The vast treasures of the Russian State Library and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art excited biographers, historians and editors, though older archivists, like the dogs in charge of the hay, disliked the invasion of their mangers by foreigners with laptops. […]
Remember Addison DeWitt, the drama critic so vividly incarnated by George Sanders in All About Eve? DeWitt is a person of formidable hauteur and waspish wit who writes without fear or favour, devoted above all to the integrity of the art form over which he sits in judgement. In his lineage stands Clement Crisp, revered […]
It has been a dry eighteen months for live music. Completed just as lockdown began in the UK last March, these short essays open worlds of sound and history, illuminating familiar and forgotten works with succinct vignettes. They make up a book that encourages you to listen to and explore gems from the piano repertoire. […]
Not quite understanding the title of Jonathan Meades’s new collection of essays, Pedro and Ricky Come Again, is no bar to enjoying them. Meades acknowledges the potential trouble on the first page, devoting a few sentences to half-heartedly explaining the reference (it alludes to a previous collection, from 1989, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the […]
Flashing his gigawatt smile, Richard Branson safely emerged from his spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, in July after it touched down in New Mexico at the end of its first fully crewed flight. The champagne-chugging began. Only nine days later, Jeff Bezos followed him to the edge of space, riding Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle. These two successful […]
The lavatory facilities at Trisha’s bar, that glorious survivor of old Soho, adorned with photos of Al Capone and the pope, bear a legend written at eye level: ‘USE AS URINAL ONLY. NO SITTING.’ Except someone – I believe they are known usually as a ‘wag’ – has inserted an H into the final word, rendering it an equally familiar (and, arguably, more appropriate) piece of Anglo-Saxon. Or ought that to be Proto-Indo-European? As John McWhorter
I have five filing cabinets. They stand in a bank against one wall of my office, mute relics of a frantic period in the evolution of information storage and retrieval and, as Craig Robertson argues in this imaginatively conceived study, of understanding what information was. They are also symbolic of my own attempts to achieve […]
Along with the tireless US-based Dutch scholar Cas Mudde, Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller is one of the most notable Western voices on the subject of populism. His main contribution has been to question dubious claims by populists to be speaking on behalf of real people. More often than not, populists are elite ‘outs’ seeking […]
As the title suggests, this is a book with an urgent message, which the author hammers home forcefully. Dave Goulson is well known as one of Britain’s leading entomologists, a bumblebee specialist and the author of such popular works as The Garden Jungle and A Sting in the Tale. Silent Earth is a cri de […]
What is life? The question sounds simple enough, but for centuries, scientists and philosophers have struggled to find a precise answer. Carl Zimmer’s engaging and informative book surveys a wide range of suggestions across the ages. For ancient Romans, a baby’s life began with its first breath, so herbally induced abortion wasn’t considered infanticide. Christian […]
If the robots are coming, will you run to greet them or run away? Or would you prefer to do something else entirely, like sit quietly with a margarita and a good book? Besides, do we even have the time to deal with super-intelligent robots, or even a bunch of fairly stupid ones, as well […]
In 1916 Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali writer and visionary, published The Home and the World, a novel critical of nationalism at a time when Indian nationalists were beginning to intensify their struggle against the Raj. Over a century later, another great Bengali, Amartya Sen, has adapted the phrase for the title of his memoir, […]
Freud took his couch. Einstein took his violin. Brecht left with twenty-six suitcases. Marcel Duchamp shipped one large trunk filled with miniatures of his artistic creations, including the iconic porcelain urinal. ‘My whole life’s work fits into one suitcase,’ he said. These are the sorts of things, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals in The Suitcase, that […]
Water covers three quarters of the planet and fills over 90 per cent of the biosphere. Yet we fight wars over it and fear that exploitable supplies will soon be depleted. Abundance, it seems, is there to be exhausted. Given the chance, people gorge until, in effect, they burst or empty the barrel. Water conservation […]
Even as the fabled midnight hour of Indian independence passed, B R Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the country’s hideously oppressed untouchables and the principal architect of its secular and democratic constitution, still harboured strong doubts and worries over the future of his country. For him, there was an unsolvable contradiction between the egalitarian ideals […]
Paul Kenyon’s narrative begins not in downtown Bucharest in December 1989 with the moment – quite possibly the only episode in modern Romanian history most people know – when Nicolae Ceaușescu, addressing a Communist Party rally, for the first time in his life encountered something other than unadulterated adulation and fled (though not very far) […]
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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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