Jenny Turner is a contributing editor at the LRB, for which she first wrote in 1991 (on James Kelman and Janice Galloway). She has written more than sixty pieces for the paper since then, on subjects including Muriel Spark, Trainspotting, Tolkien, Ayn Rand, David Foster Wallace, Angela Carter, Mark Fisher, Debbie Harry, Hannah Arendt and Gillian Rose.
Teaching Lewis Grassic Gibbon at the University of Aberdeen, Isobel Murray used to ask her women students ‘whether they have a recurrent need to retreat upstairs to a cold, wintry bedroom, there to undress and inspect themselves slowly in front of the mirror’. Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair, does this five times, by Murray’s reckoning,...
I don’t suppose Donald Trump or Keir Starmer saw the row of flags, black, white and green with a red triangle, on a high dune near the Trump International golf course, eight miles north of Aberdeen, when they flew in together on Monday evening.
‘The mycological turn’ is a phrase coined ‘half-jokingly’ by Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon in an essay published last year in Critical Inquiry. It refers to ‘an enthusiasm for fungi in the various registers of engineering, business, art, medicine and wellness, and popular culture’: a fascination with the material properties of these strange organisms...
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...
Fringe meetings at Labour Party Conference can serve different functions. People use them for networking, to swap business cards, pick up tips: the lifelong Labour supporter and the loyally Labour energy company executive both come by the Harland & Wolff business breakfast to take a look. People use them to drop in and out of, foraging for food and freebies. The PolicyMogul canvas tote...
Jenny Turner talks to Joanna Biggs about the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the loneliness of feminist work, and the seemingly unavoidable question: How do you think your life compares...
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