James Butler

James Butler is a contributing editor at the LRB. He co-founded Novara Media in 2011 and hosted its weekly radio show for several years.

From The Blog
11 August 2023

The audience of Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City is plunged into a world created in two vast warehouse spaces, one Mycenae and the other Troy, between which play out the events – more or less – of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hecuba.

Short Cuts: In Suburbia

James Butler, 10 August 2023

One of the​ Labour Party’s least attractive peculiarities is its restlessness when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. Last week’s by-elections saw the party achieve a staggering swing to overturn a 20,000-vote majority in Selby and Ainsty, and come tantalisingly close to taking Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Tory majority is now only 495. The Liberal...

Short Cuts: Radiant Ambiguity

James Butler, 27 July 2023

Afterthe fall of the National Government in 1931, R.H. Tawney wrote an essay titled ‘The Choice before the Labour Party’ in which he claimed that the party was fundamentally unclear about its purpose and priorities, allowing socialism’s ‘radiant ambiguity’ to obscure its muddle of contradictory views. The result, in power, had been paralysis. In its...

From The Blog
25 July 2023

One of Labour’s least attractive peculiarities is how restless it gets when deprived of opportunities for self-flagellation. It could have greeted last Thursday’s by-election results simply by stressing the obvious – that the country is repulsed by the Conservatives, for whom these elections were a disaster – and reciting the usual pieties about the need to supplicate further in suburbia. Instead the party has erupted in hopeless overreaction.

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...

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