LRB 5 January 2023

 

Notes from my reading: work in progress 

 

Anne Enright

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's early work is well worth reading 😀

Letters

Michael Thornley, Galen Strawson, Miranda Carter, Nicholas Murray, Sharon Footerman, Peter Rowland, Michael Jacobs, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry

(Galen Strawson referring to the veridicality thesis)

Tom Crewe

Short Cuts: Dickens and Prince

Nick Hornby's "Dickens and Prince: A Particular kind of genius" is a book that, far from crying out to be written, was resting very still and mute in a lead-lined coffin at the bottom of the ocean.

James Meek

Underwater Living

"Foley points out that councils, but the EA [environment agency] decide what gets built where. "We'll never know what happens afterwards when the development's put in place'

The developer was allowed to build in The Quadrant in Boston in exchange for a short stretch of bypass and the new stadium for Boston United. 

Anna McGee

Panel Problems

 

A problem to the National Gallery’s curators

Christopher Kelly

London in the Roman World by Dominic Perring

Geoffrey of Monmouth's account, with the story of Lud, is charming fiction. The was nothing of London before the Romans. It was expensive for the Romans who got little input from the local merchants. 

"Given the costs, it might fairly be reckoned that the annexation of Britain and the foundation of London was in great part an imperial vanity project. An accountant would have stopped the Roman empire at the channel."

Maureen N. McLane

Poem: ‘Magpie’

The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird.

Jenny Turner

‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ by Colette, translated by Paul Eprile

‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ by Colette, translated by Rachel Careau

Colette's best books. Not read in English as much as they should have been because of poor translations and people being misled by the film Gigi.

Paul Taylor

On ChatGPT

Most people don’t have to worry just yet. ChatGPT can write something that reads like a newspaper article, draft a vanilla press release or make a plausible attempt at a legal agreement, but although the content is sensible enough, it isn’t based on a detailed knowledge of events, individuals or their circumstances. Don’t get too comfortable though: GPT-4 is due to be released later this year.

Paul Mendez

George Michael: A Life by James Gavin

George Michael: Freedom Uncut directed by David Austin and George Michael

Move like a party

Fraser MacDonald

Burning Questions

The merits and problems (particulate pollution) of wood burners.

Tim Parks

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, translated by Michael Moore

Manzoni​ was born in 1785. 

 

"In the early 19th century, Italy was divided linguistically as well as territorially."

 

"I've 71 sheets to wash" - Manzoni refering to the work he needed/wanted to do the draft of 'The Betrothed' to "recreate the spoken Tuscan of the cultured classes". His book became "a persuasive model of what a future national language might look like". 

 

"By the 1850s The Betrothed was already being taught in many schools, and by the time of Manzoni’s death in 1873 it had become a national institution. In 1923, the Fascist reform of the education system made it compulsory reading for Italian children."

Linda Colley

Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson

The history of using deportations/exile instead of imprisonment (the context of Suella Braverman's 'dream' of sending immigrants to Rwanda). It's been done to millions of people throughout history.

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Fanny and Alexander’

Ingmar Bergman's film is back in the cinema 40 years after its release in Sweden.

Moral of the film: our wishes can't be relied upon to stay safely in the mind.

Michael Dillon

The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs between Civilisations by Ildiko Bellér Hann and Chris Hann

How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-education’ Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat, translated by Edward Gauvin

The Chief Witness: Escape from China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps by Sayragul Sauytbay and Alexandra Cavelius, translated by Caroline Waight

In the Camps: Life in China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler

They are shrines to Sufi saints in Xinjiang. Have the Chinese destroyed them?

"It is difficult to substantiate allegations of ill-treatment in the camps, but many accounts can be corroborated".

Beijing's preferred response to international criticism has been denial. ... 

"There are undoubtedly individuals and groups in Xinjiang intent on creating an Eastern Turkestan independent of China – the same is true for Inner (Southern) Mongolia and Tibet. They are not the malevolent creation of foreign organisations and have not been the main instigators of violence in the region. Conflict and violence have resulted from discrimination against the Uyghurs; resistance to the repression of religious and cultural expressions of identity; and from reaction to the heavy-handed crackdown, in particular arbitrary detention without trial."

James Romm

At the British Library: Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great​ was a pioneer of political spin, a master of image-making. 

Christian Lorentzen

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

"That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. ... Cohen asks her [Alicia] if [her brother] Bobby worried she was crazy: I don't think so. But it could be that the more he thought about it the more concerned he became that I wasn't. That the news could be worse? Yes. Maybe as in what if she is right."

The unconscious, he wrote, 'is a machine for operator an animal'.  ... What else could it be? ... But the souldoctors [psychiatrists] don't get any of this. They're Cartesian to the bone".

Blake Morrison

Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

800 pages of smallish print with no paragraphs or full stops....

"It's like it's not the painter who sees, it's something else seeing through the painter, and is like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it...'

It's always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, Asle thinks, 'it's in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to us'.

Talk of grace sets Fosse apart from Beckett, with whom he's often compared, and from other writers he admires (Trakl, Kafka and Hamsun)."

Alan Bennett

Diary: On failing to impress the queen

 

LRB 15th December 2022

Making notes on my reading of the issue as I go along: work in progress.

Letters

Mike Dodds, Howard Medwell, Sue Lieberman, Dennis Lack, Irene Makaryk, Ed McNally, Allen Schill, C.J. Woods, Dan Stowell, Rob Wills

Text

Colin Burrow

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography by Matthew Dennison

"The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) of 1982 is by some distance his best book.

"But beneath the crowd-pleasing surface the mythmaking of The BFG comes from areas of Dahl’s experience that he would never have wanted to acknowledge. The BFG himself suffers from a creative dysphasia which biographers including Dennison have connected with Neal’s [his wife] struggle to recover the ability to speak after her stroke: ‘Please understand that I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly ... Words,’ the BFG says, ‘is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.’ 

"In 1960 their baby son Theo was taken out for a walk in New York by his nurse, and the pram was hit by a speeding taxi. Theo suffered serious head injuries. Dahl’s scientism kicked in, as it often did at times of disaster. He spent time and money helping to design a shunt which could relieve the cerebrospinal fluid pressing on Theo’s brain (before it was superseded, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used to treat three thousand children). Then in 1962 their daughter Olivia contracted measles and died suddenly of encephalitis at the same age – just seven – at which Dahl’s sister had died. Dahl never talked about his grief for his daughter, though he kept a notebook in his desk drawer headed ‘Olivia’, which wasn’t discovered until after his death.

Jeremy Harding

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose

After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose

"Latour’s first resounding success, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, was Laboratory Life (1979), a close-up study of applied science.

"...Actor Network Theory (ANT), an open-ended way of thinking that redistributes agency to all the players in the drama of the sciences. As well as the people conducting the study, this includes the disciplines involved (e.g. sociology, biology, ethnology) and the more or less complex technologies to hand (from scribbled field notes to intricate laboratory equipment). All are bound in a skein of relations that we may as well regard as social, except that the social is no longer the proprietary realm of human beings. Crucially, the objects of study themselves must be seen as actors. ANT envisaged interactive networks, in which humans and other creatures – or ‘critters’, as Haraway calls them – were on something like an equal footing.

"But in the ANT model there are so many feet for a dialectic to stand on that it could easily trip over itself. Or run amok. I think next of the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), where ‘things’, animated by the science of magic, rapidly get out of control.

Andrew O’Hagan

Short Cuts: I Think We’re Alone Now

Text

Laleh Khalili

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe

"Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation."

McKinsey and Company, KPMG, Deloitte, Andersen Consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton. They're all on the make and toxic!

Michael Hofmann

Poem: ‘For Adam Zagajewski’

Text

Brigid von Preussen

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain by Tristram Hunt

Wedgwood was 38 years old and had suffered decades of pain precipitated by a childhood smallpox infection. His leg was sawn off without anaesthetic [in 1768]. 

The book ... presents Wedgwood as a ‘radical potter’, not just in his ceramic innovations but also in his politics. It’s true that Wedgwood was a religious non-conformist, a Dissenter who supported the American and French Revolutions, was committed to the abolition of slavery, and believed in both parliamentary reform and the education of women.

David Trotter

‘The Last Samurai’ Reread by Lee Konstantinou

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

DeWitt’s abiding interest in the practicalities of communication. She’s always been eager to explore the further reaches not just of well-established fields such as linguistics and classical scholarship, but of the digital-age specialism of ‘information theory’: the science of the organisation and retrieval of data. Her long-standing regard for the ‘beautiful, intransigent books’ published by the statistician and political scientist Edward Tufte. ‘Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information,’ Tufte writes in Envisioning Information (1990). 

Data is of no use unless it can be communicated. The origin of contemporary theories of information lies in Claude Shannon’s seminal ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, first published in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1948. Shannon’s focus was on the signal-to-noise ratio that determines whether or not a particular message will get through. The message’s ‘semantic aspects’ were irrelevant, he thought, to the ‘engineering problem’ presented by the establishment and maintenance of a channel of communication. The engineering problem at issue has of course been around for a very long time. A solution often found to work in contexts which don’t make it easy to establish and maintain a channel of communication – battlefields, for instance – is terseness. Xenophon records in his Hellenica a dispatch sent by the second-in-command of the Spartan fleet after the disastrous sea battle of Cyzicus that roughly translates as ‘ships sunk, admiral dead, survivors starving, no idea what to do next’. Similarly, Red Devlin’s trademark ‘Oh go on’ and ‘Sure you can’ are utterances incorporating minimal semantic content, the main purpose of which is to establish and maintain a channel of communication someone else would very much prefer to close. DeWitt is the sort of writer to whom engineering – the right mark in the right place, getting the message through – matters as much as exposition.

Bee Wilson

The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Gregory Conti

Maria Montessori didn't approve of toys and playing. It should all be real for children - giving them proper respect. But she was dictatorial and offended lots of people. She was Roman Catholic and tried to the church on board, but with mixed success since they didn't like her opposition to punishment.

Neal Ascherson

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald by Flora Fraser

Flora had to be persuaded to help Bonny Prince Charlie in the famous escape from Benbecula to Skye.

Though she was captured and other conspirators executed, the public and authorities were sympathetic to the romantic story, and she was spared. Later in life she and her husband joined the exodus of Islanders to America, arriving at the wrong time in the war of independence. Despite their support for the Jacobites in Scotland they were willing to join the forces of the British (Hanovarians) in America.

Peter Howarth

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton by Richard Ingrams

The chief obstacle to Chesterton’s canonisation, and to his reputation as a Christian was the antisemitism evident in his journalism. Despite his support for Zionism – in fact, thanks to it – Chesterton thought Jews would always be foreigners and honour-bound to have allegiances other than to Britain. 

GK was heavily influenced by his brother, Cecil ("Cecil was a stinker by all accounts") and by Hilaire Belloc who were antisemitic. It seems he should have paid more attention to H. G. Wells

Elisa Tamarkin

At the National Gallery: Winslow Homer

Text

Peter Phillips

The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) by Owen Rees

The fact that Victoria was a priest affects his composition. "Rees is .. is so keen to downplay the fact that Victoria was a priest (often made too much of in commentaries on his music) that he misse the special message that Victoria has embedded in the work. Throughout his setting the dominant force is light, and wherever ‘lux’ is mentioned the music takes on a new expression."

"Since the start of the new millennium, recordings of the Victoria Requiem have appeared at the rate of approximately one a year."

"As part of his recitation of the piece’s success as a concert item, he mentions that between 1986 and 2015, I [Peter Phillips] performed it 86 times, never liturgically though sometimes in a church. (That number now stands at 137.)"

Here's one of them: The Tallis Scholars directed by Peter Phillips

Sharon Olds

Poem: ‘My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together’

Text

Helen Pfeifer

As Night Falls: 18th-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark by Avner Wishnitzer

For​ most of the Ottoman Empire’s existence, the crossing from day into night was unmistakeable, as it was in much of the world. ... Ottoman nights were dark. 

In the 1660s, starting with Paris, major Western European cities began installing street lighting. ... In the Ottoman Empire, street lighting wasn’t introduced until the 1840s ... Wishnitzer, for whom the Ottomans’ modernity is not on trial, is unperturbed. Although his book isn’t structured around the question ‘why not?’, it tentatively offers an answer: turning on the lights would have extinguished the productive ambiguity that night brought with it

Lili Owen Rowlands

The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Vol. 1: ‘In My Room’, ‘I’m Going Out Tonight’, ‘Stronger Than Me’ edited by Thomas Clerc, translated by Daniel Maroun

Text

Erin Maglaque

Dante’s Little Book

Text

Marina Warner

Diary: Carmen Callil’s Causes

Text

LRB 1st December 2022

London Review of Books 1st December 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

Adam Shatz

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

On the midterm elections which were not as bad as people feared 

[A] growing number of Republicans are running away from Trump, the biggest loser in the midterms. Since 2016, the Republicans have believed they can’t win without him, given his magnetic hold on their base. But now it seems they can’t win with him, either. A growing number of Republican politicians and donors now see Ron DeSantis as a safer bet than Trump in 2024. DeSantis isn’t a ‘moderate’ Republican. He boasts of having turned Florida into a ‘citadel of freedom’ against critical race theory, ‘Faucian dystopia’, ‘Soros-funded prosecutors’ and transgender athletes.

A second Biden campaign does not sit well with most progressives, and not only because of his age. Critics of his foreign policy cite a list of mistakes: the embarrassing fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman, who repaid him by cutting oil production; the messy evacuation of Afghanistan; the failure to hold the Israeli government accountable for the army’s killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, let alone its policy of apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Territories. He has replaced Trump’s abandonment of human rights with a highly selective application that favours Ukrainians over Palestinians, Egyptians and Yemenis; along with his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, he has revived the language of Cold War Atlanticism, an anachronistic idiom in an era of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.

Letters

Anthony King, Gabriel Egan, David Elstein, James Meek, Stephen Daker, Nicholas McDowell, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Raymond Rogers, Sheila Russell, Pratinav Anil, Andrew Dobson, Inigo Kilborn

Jonathan Parry

The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe by Andrew Roberts

 Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail in 1896. Harmsworth’s principle was that ‘the three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things.’

For a while, he assumed that the newspaper industry would tend towards monopoly, and he intended to be the monopolist. By 1911, the Harmsworths owned the Mirror, the Observer and the Times, as well as the Mail; in 1914, they controlled 40 per cent of the morning and 45 per cent of the evening daily circulation.

[O]wnership of the Times strengthened his campaign in 1911 to persuade the Tories, in opposition, to give up the food taxes which supporters of full-scale imperial preference advocated but his poorer readers disliked. That year he sold the Observer rather than force it to adopt the same stance. For the rest of his career, he was more interested in using his papers to push whatever causes took his fancy than in building a monopoly for the sake of it. In 1915, the Mail’s circulation plummeted, albeit briefly, because of his relentless attacks on Lord Kitchener for the shortage of shells on the Western Front.

For​ Roberts, Northcliffe’s life is a balance sheet. He did Good Things and Bad Things (Roberts acknowledges his antisemitism), but the Good predominated.

As the historian Chandrika Kaul has shown, Northcliffe’s first tour of India coincided with the shocking famine of 1896-97. He made the paper publicise the suffering and attack the government’s relief effort, blaming its inadequacy largely on the domestic public’s ignorance of Indians’ living conditions. He continued to demand that Parliament pay more attention to Indian issues, in order to normalise civilian rather than military rule there.

Northcliffe’s lavish lifestyle – the hotel suites in Paris, Biarritz, Switzerland and the Riviera, the sponsorship of air travel, the twenty trips to the US – also made him an international celebrity.

Barbara Newman

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell

Albertus Magnus, the Dominican friar born sometime around 1200 and canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity.

Michael Wood

At the Movies: ‘Living’

Oliver Hermanus’s new film, Living, is a version of the Kurosawa movie ikiru (which means ‘to live’), with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s set in the 1950s, which is when the original film was made. Starring Bill Nighy

Tessa Hadley

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

First published in 1951. The Daughter of Time has never been out of print, and in 1990 the UK Crime Writers Association voted it the ‘greatest crime novel of all time’

Amy Larocca

A Visible Man by Edward Enninful

The mid-career autobiography of Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue. But "What was a fashion magazine? I imagine my daughters asking me this when I tell them how I spent much of my working life."
Enninful took the top job at Vogue in 2017 and became the first black editor in the magazine’s history.

Hal Foster

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by T.J. Clark

‘The fundamental wordlessness of painting’ is precious to Clark

[L]ike all art historians, he is tasked with translating pictures into words, and he embraces, even exacerbates, this difficulty. For Clark ekphrastic description* is at once necessary and doomed to fail, a verdict he extends to his own poems,

*Definition of ekphrasis: A clear, intense, self-contained argument or pictorial description of an object, especially of an artwork.

[W]hy Clark uses the term ‘uncanny’ as often as he does. It is his way of signalling the many moments in Cézanne when his ‘strangeness of vision... refuses to take anything for granted.’

Of Landscape Near Pontoise (1872), for example, he writes:

Space is not distance, says Pissarro, not a journey to a horizon: it is here where we are, an immense proximity, a total intuition of place and extent. And Time is not becoming, not endless contingency: it is a Now that goes on being Now as we live it, a unique kind of permanence.

‘Every instant deserves to be monumentalised,’ Clark adds, dissolving in a sentence the old cliché about Impressionism

‘The apples of Cézanne are not fruit any longer, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they should fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.’

‘Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are,’ Clark writes of The Basket of Apples at the outset.

 

Stefan Collini

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study by John Guillory

Gazelle Mba

At the V&A: Africa Fashion

James Lasdun

Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White

Stanford University was founded by Leland Sr. and Jane Stanford in honour of their late son, Leland Jr. Jane was an ardent Spiritualist and they believed Leland Jr was telling them to set up the university. Jane interfered with the running of the university, such as resisting the admission of women. She was eventually poisoned. But who did it and is was it connected to her interference with Stanford?

 

A.E. Stallings

Two Poems

Clare Bucknell

The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim

Chris Power

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A novel, or fictionalised autobiography, set in Pinochet’s Chile.

Daniel Trilling

My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey through the Refugee Underground by Matthieu Aikins

“In February 2020, Fuad Bedru spotted someone he recognised in the street. Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a people smuggler originally from Eritrea, was on an international wanted list, accused of holding thousands of people from various African countries captive in a ‘safe house’ in Libya, where they were starved, beaten and raped while Kidane and his fellow smugglers extorted money from their relatives. Fuad’s attempt to reach Europe had failed and he ended up back where he started, in Ethiopia. Recognising Kidane in Addis Ababa, he found a police patrol and told the officers that ‘the person standing by the electronics stall was one of the world’s most wanted human smugglers.’ Kidane offered the police officers a bribe, but they arrested him. He went on trial in October 2020.”

Sally Hayden attended the trial, but Western powers like the USA and the UK weren’t interested in this brave attempt to prosecute the people smugglers.

Laleh Khalili

Short Cuts: In Sharm El-Sheikh

COP27 "More than six hundred fossil fuel lobbyists, the most at any COP conference, were registered as delegates"

Simone Haysom

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy

Militarising conservation may not be such a good idea

Brian Dillon

At the Photographers’ Gallery: Chris Killip

Helen Sullivan

Diary: A City of Islands

LRB 17 November 2022

 

London Review of Books 17 November 2022

Draft notes from a reading of the magazine (WiP - will be edited further)

 

Letters

Claire Spencer, Victor Reus, Jim Carmichael, Tim Barker, Gareth Evans, James Parker, Andrew Lewis, J. Cohn

David Runciman

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman on the Tories. But he still feels the need to deprecate Corbyn. This:

"had it been Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who spooked the markets, Labour would have stuck with them out of a determination not to be pushed around by anyone"

is obvious nonsense given the repeated attempts of the PLP and the Party Staff to undermine and get rid of Corbyn. At least on this occasion the LRB did subsequently publish a letter (by Stephen Daker) making this point.

 

The LRB, including Runciman, demonstrated its blinkered establishment credentials by criticising, and mocking, Corbyn from the moment he became leader.

David Goldblatt

Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth by John McManus

Qatar and the 2022 Fifa World Cup: Politics, Controversy, Change by Paul Michael Brannagan and Danyel Reiche

Martha Barratt

At the Barbican: Carolee Schneemann

Rosemary Hill

Menu Design in Europe: A Visual and Culinary History of Graphic Styles and Design, 1800-2000 edited by Jim Heimann

Anthony Grafton

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

Patricia Lockwood

Liberation Day by George Saunders

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

Ailbhe Darcy

Poem: ‘Grand Guignol’

Michael Wood

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch

The longest and most bewildering language aphorism is this one:

"For everything outside the world of the senses, language can be used only by way of suggestion, but can never even come close to being used representationally because it is concerned only with possession and its associations, in accordance with the world of the senses."

Tom Stevenson

The Revolutionary Decade

Tom Stevenson in Tunisia. Until recently​ Tunisia was seen as the lone success story of the Arab Spring. But on 25 July last year, President Kais Saied summoned the prime minister to the presidential palace in Carthage and dismissed him, declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and sent the army to block the entrances to the building.

Tormod Johansen

Short Cuts: Lawless v. Ireland

Liam Shaw

Life on the Rocks by Juli Berwald

Joanne O’Leary

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis

The Uncollected Essays by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse

T.J. Clark

On Mike Davis

Clare Jackson

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

Madeleine Schwartz

Diary: Teaching in the Banlieue