In his new book, Ed Husain takes the temperature of Muslim Britain by visiting mosques in ten cities across the UK at Friday prayers. There are 3.4 million British Muslims, divided by culture, theology and class as well as temperament, and many rarely attend Friday prayers since they are either working or not especially religious. […]
I’m not sure if Cyril Connolly was the first person, with his Theory of Permanent Adolescence, to argue that the English ruling classes suffered from a mass case of arrested development, their attitudes and mind-set formed and frozen by the great public schools they attended. At any rate, this idea is reprised and brought up […]
‘Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man,’ wrote the great philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment David Hume. Julian Baggini’s The Great Guide appropriately intersperses exegesis of Hume’s philosophy with biography, character analysis and maxims on how to live that are extracted or derived from his writings. It is also an […]
Through the 1990s and 2000s, I often wondered whether the student-led democratic protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 would prove to be a blip in China’s progress or a turning point. The argument for seeing them as a blip was that China’s direction had already been set – its opening to […]
Picture the scene. Early 1960s Tokyo at a late-night bar called Club 88. You might spy owner Alonzo Shattuck, a former American intelligence agent who tracked North Koreans smuggling crystal meth into Japan. At the piano you might find Nat King Cole, enjoying a night out while on tour, while Hollywood actors such as Rick […]
Today, the area of Cairo around Ezbekiyya and Emad al-Din Street is drab and cheerless. Yet here in the 1920s and 1930s, audiences from across Egypt and the Middle East ventured through lanes peppered with brothels and hashish dens to the Ramses Theatre, the Kursaal music hall, the Casino de Paris and other glittering nightspots. […]
Although it is China’s largest city and its commercial centre, Shanghai tends to be obscured by Beijing. These two books attempt to shift the spotlight back onto the city that was known as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ during the 1920s. Champions Day by the historian James Carter examines Shanghai’s history through the prism of […]
The cover of this book sports a funky riff on Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which has been reimagined as a colourful line drawing of an adult holding hands with a child. The figure in Klee’s painting is notorious as the ‘angel of history’ invoked by the German thinker Walter Benjamin, its face ‘turned towards […]
Beside a lane I walk down every morning these days, there are two enormous old oaks, their trunks distorted by huge burls. They must be at least four hundred years old, probably more; they show up, fully grown, on a map printed two hundred years ago. I’ve always admired these trees, but the fact is […]
The ‘mysteries’ alluded to in the title of Peter Conrad’s new book might almost be taken in a religious sense. Cinema itself, as seen through the eyes of some of the enthusiasts he quotes, begins to resemble a mystery in the manner of a sacrament, a revelation of the transcendental. The commentators include the poet […]
Ella Al-Shamahi, the author of this intriguing history of the handshake, is described as a palaeoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist… and stand-up comic. This reminds me of my friend’s piano person, who has a business card which says, ‘Piano tuner and Alsatian trainer’. It would be unfair to judge this book as stand-up comedy (of President Trump’s […]
Should interpreters have agency? Should they let their choice of words influence the course of events? Thus muses veteran translator Anna Aslanyan at the start of her engaging new book Dancing on Ropes. It’s a question many interpreters must ask themselves as they navigate the perilous waters of diplomacy. It made me think of a news conference in 2002
As humans we are endlessly suggestible. We yawn when we see other people yawn, laugh when we hear others laugh and crave chocolate when we see other people eating chocolate. Likewise, when we hear about a medical complaint, there’s a natural inclination to check our own bodies for a similar twinge or itch. Taken to […]
Edmund de Waal is an internationally known potter, but through investigative energy and a sense of obligation he has also become the chronicler of his Jewish ancestors. In his acclaimed The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), he makes a collection of small Japanese carved figures, acquired in Paris in the 1870s and passed down in […]
‘There has always been the lingering speculation … that Vogue was on the verge of collapse,’ writes Nina-Sophia Miralles. ‘That cry went up when the founder died in 1906, during the Depression of the 1930s, in the youth-led revolution of the 1960s and at the dawn of the blogger generation of the 2010s. But no […]
‘FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!! WOW FUCK!! SHIT!!’ The language sounds spontaneous, even by the standards of email; or was it contrived pour épater les bourgeois? Tom Higham’s ejaculations seem disproportionate as well as ineloquent. He had just heard that a pile of ancient detritus from Denisova Cave in Siberia contained one bone, less than an inch […]
There has been no small amount of schadenfreude over Jordan Peterson’s slide from public view. Famous for flagellating ‘social justice types’ and telling the Left to ‘grow the hell up’, he admitted last year that he had been struggling with benzodiazepine addiction. This was met with cruel amusement by some, who found it ironic that […]
‘We would rather be ruined than changed,’ W H Auden sombrely wrote. Although I suspect Adam Phillips might agree with this in the sense Auden intended it, the title of his latest intellectually bracing book appears to suggest otherwise. The ability to change is at the core of the theory of evolution. It is not, […]
Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website, and We are Bellingcat tells its story. Bellingcat’s approach is often called ‘open-source intelligence’ (OSINT). But, as Higgins explains, the term OSINT derives from the work of government intelligence agencies, whose secretive practices differ from those of Bellingcat. A more accurate description of Higgins’s […]
On the morning of 12 April 1961, an orange dot appeared in the sky over the Russian village of Smelovka, growing as it fell. A government official reported what he witnessed: ‘A spaceship-sputnik landed with cosmonaut Gagarin Yuri Alekseyevich.’ The official was lying – in fact Gagarin was never there. Villagers arriving at the scene found no one inside
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A review of my biography of Wittgenstein, and of his newly published last love letters, in the Literary Review: via @Lit_Review
Jane O'Grady - It’s a Wonderful Life
Jane O'Grady: It’s a Wonderful Life - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb;...
literaryreview.co.uk
It was my pleasure to review Stephanie Wambugu’s enjoyably Ferrante-esque debut Lonely Crowds for @Lit_Review’s April issue, out now
Joseph Williams - Friends Disunited
Joseph Williams: Friends Disunited - Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
literaryreview.co.uk