When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise. Adolf Eichmann was on trial after being captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Israel to face charges of being a leading organiser of the Holocaust. Arendt was there to report on the trial for the New Yorker.
Posters went up in my part of London a few weeks ago advertising a talk on Frantz Fanon and decolonisation. As the war rages in Israel and Gaza, Fanon is once again invoked, as he has been many times since his death in 1961, for his insights into the plight of the colonised and the […]
Academics like few things more than to complain about the state of their profession. A recurrent gripe is that their fields have descended into hyper-specialisation, with an overload of knowledge – books, articles and now various forms of digital material – leading to the death of the great generalists of yesteryear, who were able to leap bravely
Armand D’Angour’s Socrates in Love is a terrific read. Part novelistic fantasy biography, part deeply serious, source-based reconstruction, it will appeal in varying ways and measures to readers of different tastes and personal predilections. At one level it is an – I think probably doomed – attempt at Sherlock Holmes-style detection. At another level it […]
Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by catarrh and colic and determined not to be the cause of unnecessary expenditure or trouble. Catherine had already ‘bought’ him by purchasing his […]
‘Historians of alchemy’, wrote Herbert Butterfield in 1949, ‘seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.’ Seventy years on, readers may believe that this gloriously rude assessment needs no updating. But what, then, are we to make of the fact that the greatest scientific hero of them all, that model of geometric rationality, Isaac Newton, devoted a great proportion of his life to the pursuit
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Margaret Atwood has become a cultural weathervane, blamed for predicting dystopia and celebrated for resisting it. Yet her ‘memoir of sorts’ reveals a more complicated, playful figure.
@sophieolive introduces us to a young Peggy.
Sophie Oliver - Ms Fixit’s Characteristics
Sophie Oliver: Ms Fixit’s Characteristics - Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood
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For a writer so ubiquitous, George Orwell remains curiously elusive. His voice is lost, his image scarce; all that survives is the prose, and the interpretations built upon it.
@Dorianlynskey wonders what is to be done.
Dorian Lynskey - Doublethink & Doubt
Dorian Lynskey: Doublethink & Doubt - Orwell: 2+2=5 by Raoul Peck (dir); George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Robert Colls
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The court of Henry VIII is easy to envision thanks to Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits: the bearded king, Anne of Cleves in red and gold, Thomas Cromwell demure in black.
Peter Marshall paints a picture of the artist himself.
Peter Marshall - Varnish & Virtue
Peter Marshall: Varnish & Virtue - Holbein: Renaissance Master by Elizabeth Goldring
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