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The Democrats’ Defeat

Adam Tooze

On 20 January 2025 Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the Republicans will win control of the House as well as the Senate. For the Democrats it is a major defeat. Never before has so much money been spent on a US election, to so little avail. For all Trump’s hobnobbing with billionaires, Harris...

 

Ukraine’s Battle Fatigue

James Meek

The authorities​ in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy...

 

Guns across the Border

Rachel Nolan

There are​ only two gun stores in Mexico. Throughout the enormous country, which takes three full days to cross by car from top to bottom if you don’t stop, the only places you can legally buy a gun are a shop on a military base in the capital and a shop on another military base in the large northern city of Monterrey. It’s not advisable to drive straight through Mexico any more,...

 

Labour’s Conundrum

William Davies

Before​ Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy’. In a...

 

Delmore Schwartz’s Decline

Joanne O’Leary

Theworld was rigged against Delmore Schwartz. His mother, Rose, was to blame. After all, it was she who decided on his first name – the ‘crucial crime’, and an expression, he felt, of her ‘brazen gaucheness’, her botched attempt to assimilate into American society. ‘I never heard anybody call him “Schwartz”,’ Dwight Macdonald recalled....

 

Francis Williams Gets His Due

Fara Dabhoiwala

In​ the autumn of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs...

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At the Rijksmuseum

Panniers and Petticoats

Clare Bucknell

Novelists​ like to snoop inside their characters’ underwear drawers. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Laura, the heroine, finds her sister-in-law Caroline difficult to read, except in one telling aspect:

Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza; Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura,...

 

Uses of Prehistory

Oliver Cussen

The Earth​ aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a synthesis of sacred history and Persian, Greek and Roman myth, and so it satisfied both theologians and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century later, neither the church nor classics...

 

Chasing the Cybercriminals

Vadim Nikitin

It had been​ twenty years since my last research trip to the British Library when, in November last year, I received an email with the subject line: ‘Important information about our recent cyber incident’.

As you may be aware, we are currently experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber attack. Following confirmation that this was a ransomware attack, we’re...

 

Food Made Flesh

Erin Maglaque

What​ is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable. The body as input-output system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as...

Short Cuts

Cosy Crime

Thomas Jones

In​ the mid-1980s, before they moved to London and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:

Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house....

At the Movies

‘Anora’

Michael Wood

In​ a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It...

 

Alberti and the Ancients

Anthony Grafton

Late in the​ 1460s, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a book on ciphers. It was a dialogue between him and a longtime friend, Leonardo Dati, who had recently been made head of the papal secretariat. Like many of Alberti’s writings, On Composing Ciphers was highly original: the first European text to propose a polyalphabetic cipher, which used coding wheels, and to explain the principles of...

Diary

Fred Sparks’s Bequest

David Margolick

As peripatetic​ as he was, Fred Sparks, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of the Palestinian refugees....

 

On Yoko Tawada

Adam Thirlwell

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But...

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

Check back for seasonal announcements, including Joyce Carol Oates at the Garden Cinema and an alternative Nine Lessons and Carols.

Read more about Partner Events, Winter 2024
Events

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