James Butler

Italo Calvino​ has an image problem. He has been pigeonholed as an Italian Queneau or a knock-off Borges. His admirers proselytise – not always helpfully – about The Joy of Semiosis. Reviewers have tried to account for his interest in narrative at both the level of theory and pleasure by calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling...

Translating ethical urgency into a politics of care would not lack for pathologies: it would be potentially suffocating, conformist, a licence for moral scolds wielding duty as a cudgel and inclined to conceal abuse. But the urgency remains. All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work. It doesn’t help that so many definitions of care are vague or tautologous, constituting the entire range of social activities that allow human beings to exist in the world.

Despite lasting almost​ two months, the process of selecting Britain’s new prime minister has revealed little about what Liz Truss intends to do. Her short victory speech contained pro forma praise for her predecessor and ritual execration of the defeated socialist threat. Her Downing Street speech turned on the Cameron-era cliché about an ‘aspiration nation’. She...

Boris​ Johnson does not like resigning. Shamelessness has been his trademark, and it has allowed him to brazen out scandals that would have brought down other politicians (and better men). Before his speech outside Number Ten on 7 July, his sole political resignation had been from Theresa May’s cabinet in 2018, the opening gambit in his successful campaign to take her job. In 2004,...

Bulbs wait​ for the right conditions – sufficient light, water, warmth – to produce new growth. Eighteen months ago, when I moved to a new boat, the conditions were right for me, too. For the first time after more than ten years living in London I had some outdoor space. I lugged pots, troughs and bags of compost and, by the end of the summer, had planted a little patch around...