By the time I registered as a postgraduate student at the Warburg Institute in 1977, its former Director, Sir Ernst Gombrich, had already retired some years before and was a slightly mysterious figure, occasionally to be spotted shuffling through the bookstacks, and rumoured to be working on a history of attitudes towards primitivism. In the […]
In 1926 Max Beerbohm reflected that the world ‘is not likely to find caricature essential to its future happiness’. Certainly it remains an endangered graphic form. The threats come from within – from lazy second-raters who are happy to confect Harold Wilson out of a pipe and a Gannex mac – and from without. Currently […]
James Fenton is a poet and a hack – not just any hack; he was one of the valiant few who stayed on in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon – so you can be sure he will never be boring. In Borneo, he recalls, he and his party had to join their guides in […]
Of all the Old Masters, Leonardo and Caravaggio are undoubtedly the media darlings, subject to a ceaseless tide of speculative claim and counter-claim (the new loo paper dispensers in my local leisure centre are made by Da Vinci Solutions: is there nothing he couldn’t turn his hand to?). But that grumpy old man-mountain Michelangelo continues […]
For Gabriele d’Annunzio the love of war was more than a literary conceit. The self-styled ‘poet of slaughter’ was also an officer who served in some of the bloodiest campaigns in the Italian offensive against the Habsburg Empire during the First World War, an offensive for which he had campaigned fiercely. Over a million soldiers […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm