Eliot Weinberger

They could have picked Ted Cruz, the first-term senator from Texas. Cruz may be unique among politicians anywhere in that every mention of his name is always accompanied by remarks on his loathsomeness. John McCain has called him a ‘wacko bird’, former speaker of the House, John Boehner, ‘a jackass’ and ‘Lucifer in the flesh’. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who was very briefly a candidate himself, joked: ‘If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you.’ George W. Bush, with his usual rhetorical panache, said: ‘I just don’t like the guy.’

Charles Reznikoff​ may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard. And then, in the last decades of his life, devoting himself...

In 125 CE​, Aristides, defending Christianity before the Emperor Hadrian at the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries, divided the world into four: Greeks (which included Egyptians and Chaldeans), Jews, Christians and barbarians. In the Christian West the coming of Islam revised this list into a taxonomy that would remain in place for a millennium: Jews, Christians,...