Césaire’s Reversals

Musab Younis

In​ 2004, the political theorist Françoise Vergès decided to go to Martinique to interview Aimé Césaire, the poet, politician, anticolonialist and co-founder of the négritude movement. She was surprised to discover that most of her acquaintances in Paris hadn’t heard of him, or ‘thought he was dead’. This tells us something about the...

 

Wyndham Lewis goes for it

Seamus Perry

Apologists​ for art have often set about their task by associating the workings of the imagination with other sorts of mental activity of which people tend to think well. The Romantics were especially drawn to this form of vindication, their defensiveness due no doubt to the nagging suspicion that, while the imagination seemed all-important to them, most of their contemporaries regarded it...

 

Leaving Graceland

Jessica Olin

LisaMarie Presley, Elvis’s only child and heir, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, the year of the Comeback Special, the year that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa...

From the blog

ICC: Most Wanted

Alex de Waal

3 December 2024

Seventeen years ago, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first person to hold the post of prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, decided to push international criminal law to a new boundary. He would make a head of state into a fugitive from justice. His target was the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes in Darfur. The current ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, has thrown down another gauntlet.

 

Lore Segal’s Luck

Kasia Boddy

Read any interview​ with Lore Segal and she’ll tell you about her shortcomings:

I seem to have a reluctance to make things happen.

I’m not a grand creator of new characters.

I keep rewriting everything 48 times.

I don’t have the long breath required to think in terms of a novel.

I’m bad at thinking about society.

I don’t know how to be serious without being funny.

I am...

 

When Britannia Ruled the Waves

Ferdinand Mount

There’s​ no ‘s’ at the end of ‘rule’, and there’s a comma before it. As every schoolboy pedant knows, it’s ‘Britannia, rule the waves!’ – an imperative or exhortation, not a statement of fact. An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national...

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The Belgrano Diary

When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of the empire, and her premiership. Onboard HMS Conqueror, one of its nuclear submarines, Lieutenant Narendra Sethia starts to keep a diary. The sinking of the General Belgrano was the bloodiest and most controversial military action of...

 

Eva Baltasar’s ‘Mammoth’

Sarah Resnick

The narrators​ of Permafrost (2018), Boulder (2020) and Mammoth, a triptych of novels by the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, have much in common. They are young, and lesbian, and nameless. They live, or once lived, in Barcelona. And they are disillusioned with the expectations of modern life. Early in adulthood each woman realises that the middle-class mores of her childhood mask widespread...

 

In Camden

Inigo Thomas

The central staircase​ at Camden Town Hall is made of white marble from Carrara and is more lustrous than any marble staircase you’re likely to see in Rome. The building was designed for the Borough of St Pancras by Albert Thomas, a disciple of Lutyens, and opened in 1937 as St Pancras Town Hall. Twenty-eight years later, the borough was one of three – along with Holborn and...

 

Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Annihilation’

Adam Mars-Jones

The strange pleasure​ of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover behind one set of values so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling. He can and does create character, but...

At the Sainsbury Centre

Ayahuasca Art

Mike Jay

The Shipibo-Konibo​ people, who live along the banks of the Ucayali river in Peru, are one of several Amazonian groups whose art is intimately connected to their use of ayahuasca, a vision-inducing brew of jungle vines and leaves that contains the mind-altering compounds harmaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Their textiles and ceramics are characterised by kené, geometric patterns...

 

Tudor Marriage Markets

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Woe​ to royal daughters over the centuries: from the moment of their birth, they were seen as assets to be traded on the international marriage market for the benefit of their families. The bidding for such unions began early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to...

Diary

Encounters with Aliens

Patricia Lockwood

We​ had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband lost half of his blood volume after a bowel resection in 2022, after the 47 days in the desert during which I personally tended his wound, the calendar had become meaningless, as had numbers....

 

A Historian's Historians

Christopher Clark

Formore than fifty years, Perry Anderson has been the most erudite and compelling voice on the British Marxist left. His writing has always been marked by prodigious reading across the widest possible front, a commitment to clarity and analytical rigour, and fidelity to a materialist reading of history. The style is cool and forensic, its austere surfaces set off by a sprinkling of...

 

Trump and US Power

Tom Stevenson

Donald Trump’s return as US president can’t match the shock of his ascent in 2016. But it does force a permanent change in historical perspective. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory was treated by Trump’s domestic and international opponents as though it were deliverance from a bout of delirium. In 2024 it is Biden’s single term that looks like a Covid-induced...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s revolutionary thought of the 20th century, truth and lies in the ancient world, and satire.

Read more about Close Readings 2024

Partner Events, Winter 2024-Spring 2025

Check back for seasonal announcements, including Alternative Lessons and Carols, a special screening of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer at Regent Street Cinema, and a concert inspired by Edward Said’s ‘Thoughts on Late Style’.

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