On Claud Cockburn

Neal Ascherson

On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.’...

 

Learning to Love the Dissidents

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Soviet dissidents​ saw things differently from those around them and asserted their right to do so. This was a phenomenon of the post-Stalin period, and specifically of the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s: the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Thaw, which happens to be the period in which I first encountered the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in Moscow. Naturally their...

 

Israel’s Forever War

Adam Shatz

Hassan Nasrallah’s​ death was announced on Saturday, 28 September, the anniversary of the death of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the father of Pan-Arabism. Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, three years after his humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, the ‘naksah’ or setback that led to Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza...

 

Bad Samaritan

Bee Wilson

‘Things being as they are,’ the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote in her 1971 essay ‘A Defence of Abortion’, two years before Roe v. Wade, ‘there isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do.’ By third parties, Thomson meant abortionists. In her essay Thomson compared the situation of a...

Diary

Why I Resigned

Francis FitzGibbon

Theplan to ‘off-shore’ asylum seekers to Rwanda was the last straw. In May 2023, I resigned as a (part-time) immigration judge after twenty years in the job. It was less a matter of conscience, more of recognition that the role had become irrevocably tainted by the politics of asylum. For years, people coming to the UK for respite from horrors in their home countries had faced...

Podcast

Inside Israel

Mairav Zonszein, Amjad Iraqi and Adam Shatz

In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the Netanyahu government is opposed by many Israeli Jews, and increasing numbers have left the country, support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon remains high because few can...

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At the Movies

‘Megalopolis’

Michael Wood

Reflecting​ on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new movie. It has a beginning...

 

On Binyavanga Wainaina

Jeremy Harding

Binyavanga Wainaina​ became an African literary celebrity in 2005, when Granta published his instructions for travel writers, journalists and aid workers on ‘how to write about Africa’. ‘Be sure to leave the impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed,’ he wrote. ‘Among your characters you must always include the Starving...

 

What’s wrong with the electoral college

Colin Kidd

‘The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.’ The tweet came in the early hours of 7 November 2012, when it seemed likely that the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who had lost the electoral college to Barack Obama, might end up ahead of Obama in the popular vote. In a further message, subsequently deleted, the same tweeter added that Obama had ‘lost...

 

Aby Warburg’s Afterlives

Tom Stammers

In​ 1926, Aby Warburg taught a seminar at Hamburg University on the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the ‘exemplary pathfinder’ whose investigation of the Italian Renaissance anticipated Warburg’s own. Burckhardt was, he argued, ‘a necromancer in full consciousness’, who conjured up sinister shadows but ultimately eluded them. Invoking a character from Faust Part II,...

 

William James’s Prescriptions

Helen Thaventhiran

William James​ is famous for two things: his work as a psychologist and philosopher, and his family. But before anything else he was a qualified doctor, who frequently pronounced on questions of bodily and mental health, his thought sharpened by his own experiences. He suffered from a bad back, a troublesome heart, poor eyesight and tenacious ‘suicidal musings’. Medical training...

 

Fire at the Mack

Rosemary Hill

On​ 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world. Le Monde called it ‘a...

At the Louisiana

On Chaïm Soutine

Michael Hofmann

This​ Louisiana was not bought off a skint, warmongering Napoleon for a measly $15 million, but is one of the most beautiful galleries of modern art anywhere. It was founded in 1958 in a dazzlingly extended and updated villa on the Zealand coast, an hour north of Copenhagen, and named for the first owner’s three (presumably consecutive) wives, all of whom were called Louise. I was...

 

On Cristina Campo

Toril Moi

Ipicked upThe Unforgivable out of pure curiosity. There is something fascinating about opening a book by a writer one knows nothing about. A good reader, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo turned out to be a...

 

Counting without Numbers

Tom Johnson

It is​ an instructive irony of English political history that the Houses of Parliament were burned down not by revolutionaries but by bureaucrats. In 1834, John Phipps, an assistant surveyor for London in the Office of Woods and Forests, was tasked with finding more office space in the cluttered Exchequer buildings at Westminster. He discovered that a whole suite of rooms was being used for...

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Close Readings 2024

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