On Gillian Rose

Jenny Turner

Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them. Would you give up all your friends? Would you simply avoid that particular friend? Would you try to have it out, which probably wouldn’t work, but would, if you held your nerve, change...

 

What was Bidenomics?

Adam Tooze

As sparks​ fly up from the welding rods, the beak of a bald eagle emblazoned on the welder’s mask curves menacingly towards the viewer. With comic-book subtlety the image screams: American industrial power at work. It’s an image of industrialism more redolent of socialist realism or the New Deal than of the 21st century. And yet there is nothing tongue in cheek about it. The...

 

Drinking for France

Julian Barnes

Awidely distributed​ temperance poster from 1902 produced by Dr Galtier-Boissière is headed ‘L’alcool, voilà l’ennemi.’ It shows two faces at the top. One is that of a spruce, healthily moustached young man in suit and tie, with a clear forehead and determined gaze. He is captioned ‘Avant l’alcoolisme’. Next to him is his scruffy,...

From the blog

We are not OK

Selma Dabbagh

29 October 2024

Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.

 

After the Plague

Tom Shippey

The notion​ that human history is determined at bottom by natural forces and non-human factors seems to be an idea whose time has come. In Prisoners of Geography (2015), Tim Marshall argued that the fate of nations depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the...

 

Labour Infighting

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

By​ 2014, Keir Starmer was tired of running up against the ‘limits of legal justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden...

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How to Cast a Spell

Nick Richardson

Part​ of the magic of grimoires resides in the word itself: ‘grim’, with its aura of frost and severity, opening onto that chasmic vowel, a playground for demons. Exactly when or why manuals for conjuring spirits came to be known by this name is unclear, but the convention was well established in Europe by the Middle Ages. ‘Grimoire’ is French for...

 

10 Rillington Place

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

On​ 24 March 1953, the day on which, at 10.20 p.m., Queen Mary would breathe her last, a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician called Beresford Wallace Brown, who had arrived in England in 1950 and now worked in a dairy in Shepherd’s Bush, was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs...

Diary

Return to Baghdad

Nabil Salih

This summer​, on a visit home, I went to hear the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra at the National Theatre, in the Karradah district of Baghdad. The theatre has a roof shaped like a Bedouin tent and four Islamic arches adorning its façade. Inside, the ceiling is decorated with cascading wooden planks, designed to evoke the trunks of Iraqi palm trees – now a rare and exotic...

Short Cuts

BP in Azerbaijan

Peter Geoghegan

The​ 29th UN Climate Change Conference begins in Baku on 11 November. For the third year in a row, as a recent editorial in the Financial Times pointed out, COP is being hosted ‘in an authoritarian state with a dubious human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence...

 

Fireworks!

Malcolm Gaskill

When​ I was growing up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and trousers;...

At the British Museum

‘Silk Roads’

Josephine Quinn

My first visit​ to the British Museum was on a date, and under duress. My objection wasn’t to elite cultural institutions or stolen goods, but to visiting a museum about Britain. I was studying classics to get away from all that. I can still remember the bewilderment of walking into those first long galleries with their five-legged bulls and giant stone kings. I saw the Rosetta Stone...

 

No More Mendelism

Lorraine Daston

Perhapsyou too have planted a hydrangea in your garden, its blossom as blue as blue can be while still in its pot from the nursery, only to watch its colour muddy and turn ever pinker as the plant’s roots sink into alkaline soil. This is an example of the way the visible character of an organism can be modified by its immediate environment – in this case, soil pH. Many other...

 

Charlotte Wood’s ‘Stone Yard Devotional’

Blake Morrison

The mouse plague​ in Queensland and New South Wales in 2020-21 was overshadowed by Covid-19. But the plague within the plague was no small matter. Heavy rain after a long drought meant bumper grain crops, which colonies of mice devastated. The use of poison (zinc phosphide coated on wheat and scattered around pastures) had little effect: there were always more mice. Residents suffered no...

 

Across the Indian Ocean

Laleh Khalili

Shah Sulaiman, the 17th-century Safavid monarch of Iran, liked to spend his time drinking wine with his many wives. He avoided war with the Ottoman Empire and was largely uninterested in the European powers. Like many potentates on the Indian Ocean rim, however, he was fascinated by the other kingdoms surrounding this vast watery realm. In 1685, he sent a diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya,...

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