Jeremy Harding

‘Couple dans une gare parisienne’ (1959)

In​ 1959, the French monthly Réalités ran a piece by Bernard Frank, a precocious novelist and former protégé of Sartre, explaining that a lost generation of young bourgeois had found their bearings in existentialism. Post-occupation and post-Vichy, he argued, the model hero was an impoverished...

An hour​ into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from recycled mobile phone waste and is roughly the size of a ceremonial mask designed to fit a human head. Tshibwabwa was an artist in residence at the museum in 2022 and his work is now part of...

It often feels​ as though New Left Review has been around for as long as the King James Bible. It addresses its readers without condescension in a time-honoured idiom. Occasionally its writers serve up daunting preambles to their pieces. Here is Dylan Riley in 2018 explaining why it’s misleading to think of Trump as a fascist: ‘The classical fascisms that took shape in Italy and...

Binyavanga Wainaina​ became an African literary celebrity in 2005, when Granta published his instructions for travel writers, journalists and aid workers on ‘how to write about Africa’. ‘Be sure to leave the impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed,’ he wrote. ‘Among your characters you must always include the Starving...