On the Grenfell inquiry

James Butler

The fireat Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 killed 72 people, 18 of them children. Most died from asphyxiation after inhaling toxic smoke from the cladding on the block, which acted like a coat of petrol on the walls. Some died leaping from the building. Families died together, huddled under beds, having been told to stay where they were. Disabled residents died waiting for a rescue that...

extra

After Nasrallah

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 Strip,...

 

Classics beyond Balliol

Katherine Harloe

In​ an essay on scholarly ‘necrophilia’, published in 2021, the historian of science Lorraine Daston noted that writing histories of their own disciplines is often an excuse for scholars to commune with ghosts. Not just any ghosts, either, but their academic forebears. Daston connects this longing to the intense bonds forged by traditional institutions of humanistic education....

 

On Fredric Jameson

Terry Eagleton

In the later decades​ of the last century, a new wave of ideas broke across the study of literature throughout the world. Known simply as ‘theory’, it ranged from structuralism to feminism, semiotics to hermeneutics, Marxism to deconstruction. All this was formidably abstract stuff, but it managed to be sexy as well. Its intellectual ambitiousness, along with its readiness to...

 

Central Asian Polymaths

Helen Pfeifer

In​ the early 11th century, at Nandana, a fort in the mountains of northern Punjab, the polymath Abu Rayhan al-Biruni realised his dream of measuring the size of the earth. Two centuries earlier, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun had sent a group of astronomers into the desert for the same purpose. The advantage of Biruni’s method was that it ‘did not require walking in...

 

Derrida’s Hospitality

Jonathan Rée

Immanuel Kant​ was against revolutions. In 1793 he described them as the work of ‘political criminals’ and ‘injustice in the highest degree’. He accepted, on the other hand, that they sometimes turned out well: the Dutch had been lucky with theirs in 1579, for example, and so had the British in 1688. As for the French in 1789, it was too soon to say; but in one...

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Hardy’s Bad Behaviour

Matthew Bevis

‘Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an...

 

Kill Lists

Sophia Goodfriend

On​ 17 September thousands of pagers held by members of Hizbullah across Lebanon and Syria exploded over the course of an hour, killing twelve people and injuring more than two thousand. The next day hundreds of walkie-talkies exploded, killing at least 25 people and injuring 750. These operations, designed to catch the world’s attention, were the latest example of the deployment by...

 

On AI Chatbots

James Vincent

At eight o’clock​ on Christmas morning 2021, guards at Windsor Castle discovered an intruder in the grounds. Wearing a homemade mask and carrying a loaded crossbow, 19-year-old Jaswant Chail had scaled the castle’s perimeter using a nylon rope ladder. When approached by armed officers, he told them: ‘I am here to kill the queen.’ Chail was arrested without further...

Short Cuts

Just ask Tony

David Runciman

Unusually​ for a politician, Tony Blair is an authentic writer, in that he authentically sounds like himself. His post-prime-ministerial memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it. The style of his new book, On Leadership...

 

Anne Carson’s ‘Wrong Norma’

Michael Wood

‘This is the Nile and I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be...

At the Royal Academy

Modernism in Ukraine

Natasha Fedorson

The collection​ of modernist art from Ukraine currently on show at the Royal Academy is both an exhibition and a conservation project. In the Eye of the Storm (until 13 October) comprises 65 pieces, most of them on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. After the removal of works from Kherson Art Museum at the beginning of Russia’s invasion (ten thousand pieces are...

 

Guggenheim’s Bohemia

Clare Bucknell

Peggy Guggenheim​ had an ‘excessively unhappy’ childhood. ‘I have no pleasant memories of any kind,’ she wrote in her memoir, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1946). She was biting about the glamorous townhouse on East 72nd St where she and her sisters, Benita and Hazel, grew up:

In the centre of this floor was a reception room with a huge tapestry of...

 

‘The Safekeep’

Jon Day

Around​ 150,000 Dutch Jews were living in the Netherlands when Germany invaded on 10 May 1940. Over the next five years, 107,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. After the war, only 5000 returned home, where they were often met with indifference, if not hostility. Some were presented with bills for unpaid taxes or found that their homes had been repossessed. Others were told...

 

Cinema-going

Dani Garavelli

Igrew up​ in the seaside town of Prestwick, on the West Coast of Scotland. In its heyday, Prestwick was a haven for workers from the shipyards and factories, who would travel ‘doon the watter’ by paddle steamer or train for the Glasgow Fair, the fortnight in July when all the city’s industries shut down. At one end of the promenade stood the bathing lake: an Olympic...

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, Autumn 2024

Check back for seasonal announcements, including a lecture about a painting like no other at the V&A, screenings at the Garden Cinema and more.

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