Unknowables

Caroline Campbell: Antonello da Messina, 7 October 2021

Antonello da Messina 
edited by Caterina Cardona and Giovanni Carlo Federico Federico Villa.
Palazzo Reale/Skira, 299 pp., £35, April 2019, 978 88 572 3898 2
Show More
Show More
... Sicily in the last fifteen years – in New York (2005), Rome (2006), Rovereto (2013) and Milan (2019). These shows, and the books that accompanied them, have been an important means of consolidating our knowledge of Antonello and appreciating the quality of his work. Only two of the books – from the Met show in New York and the more recent Palazzo Reale ...

You say embargo …

Tony Wood: The Cuban Model, 1 July 2021

The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times 
by Anthony DePalma.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £9.99, July 2021, 978 1 78470 822 1
Show More
We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World 
by Helen Yaffe.
Yale, 363 pp., £18.99, February 2020, 978 0 300 23003 1
Show More
Show More
... reforms could have undesirable side effects, and there was a tightrope to be walked. In February 2019, after further public consultation, a new constitution was approved by referendum. It retains an insistence on Cuba’s socialist character and on the primacy of the Communist Party, but differs from the 1976 version in significant ways. It straightens out ...

Diary

Helen Sullivan: A City of Islands, 1 December 2022

... subject to intense lobbying by both sides. The Solomon Islands switched allegiance from Taiwan in 2019, while Nauru has switched and switched back again in recent years. ‘A war for Taiwan is equivalent to a war between China and the United States,’ Panuelo wrote. ‘Whoever wins in such a conflict, we will once again be the collateral damage.’The ...

Diary

Long Ling: Divorce, Beijing Style, 5 March 2026

... refused promotion. Without promotion, your career in the civil service reaches a dead end. Every January, when party members must report, tempers run high in families and home life becomes strained.The pressures increase with career advancement. A 50-year-old male cadre at the division level, like Xiwang’s husband, will probably retire between the ages of ...

Jailed, Failed, Forgotten

Dani Garavelli: Deaths in Custody, 20 February 2025

... In England and Wales, a campaign by the charity Inquest led to a change in the law, and since January 2022 bereaved families have been entitled to non-means-tested legal aid for all Article 2 inquests (deaths where the state had a duty to protect the deceased). This legislation doesn’t cover Scotland, though the Allans were granted legal aid after a ...

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

William Davies: Education, Education, Algorithm, 24 February 2022

... and a hostile media that teachers were still ‘working’. But an Ofsted guidance note from January 2021 cautioned against the assumption that live lessons are the ‘gold standard’ of remote education. It is difficult for pupils to sustain concentration for the duration of a class, and for the teacher to get a meaningful dialogue going or give proper ...

Tesco and a Motorway

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: In the Coalfields, 9 September 2021

Anne & Betty: United by the Struggle 
by Anne Scargill and Betty Cook.
Route, 256 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 1 901927 81 8
Show More
Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 20th Century: Hannah’s Daughter 
by Margaret Hedley.
History Press, 159 pp., £14.99, March, 978 0 7509 9504 7
Show More
Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland 
by Ewan Gibbs.
University of London, 306 pp., £25, February, 978 1 912702 55 8
Show More
Scottish Coal Miners in the 20th Century 
by Jim Phillips.
Edinburgh, 336 pp., £24.99, February, 978 1 4744 5232 8
Show More
The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain 
by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson.
Verso, 402 pp., £20, June, 978 1 83976 155 3
Show More
Show More
... with managers improved, as symbolised in the ceremony on the day the NCB came into being, 1 January 1947, at Horden colliery in Durham, when the trade union lodge secretary and the pit manager came together to bury an actual hatchet. The NCB’s huge investments transformed a technologically backward industry into a far more productive one. Miners were ...

At the Top Table

Tom Stevenson: The Defence Intelligentsia, 6 October 2022

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 45699 6
Show More
Show More
... innocent lives and removing a dictatorial regime.’ The enthusiasm for intervention remains. In January this year, as a Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed increasingly likely, RUSI’s research fellow for European security, Ed Arnold, argued that the crisis in Ukraine would provide an opportunity ‘to demonstrate exactly what Global Britain means’. At ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... The Barclays had offered to pay for a Sark helipad; the government refused to consider one. In January 2012, the seigneur’s wife had to be taken to Guernsey by lifeboat ambulance. Delaney’s Sark Newsletter accused the island’s doctor of negligence for not using the Barclays’ helicopter on Brecqhou. The doctor resigned and left the island; one ...

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

... shares in Ryanair had fallen by 12 per cent over the previous quarter and by 29 per cent since January 2018.Passports: By the end of October, Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs had recorded 158,763 applications for Irish passports from citizens of Northern Ireland and Great Britain since January; in 2012, there ...

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

... against former British soldiers.Few legacy cases of any sort have resulted in prosecution. Between January 2012 and May 2023, the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service brought prosecutions in nine cases related to republican paramilitaries, four related to loyalists, five to former soldiers and none to former police officers. To date, only one former ...

Anti-Constitutional

Wolfgang Streeck: Manufacturing Political Consent, 15 August 2024

Verfassungsschutz: Wie der Geheimdienst Politik macht 
by Ronen Steinke.
Berlin Verlag, 221 pp., €24, June 2023, 978 3 8270 1471 9
Show More
Show More
... it from receiving the significant financial support to which German parties are entitled. In 2019, the government and the two chambers of parliament asked the court to exclude the NPD from public funding for six years – the party having shrunk in the meantime into a tiny sect calling itself Die Heimat (Homeland). The motion was granted five years ...

Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
Show More
Show More
... its economy and fomenting a (failed) coup against Touré's government.The Biafran War ended in January 1970; around two million people died as a result of the conflict. General Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian head of state, announced that the Second World Festival of Black Art, or Festac, the new name reflecting changes in racial terminology, was back on the ...

Architectures of Containment

Clair Wills: Ireland’s Lost Children, 20 May 2021

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes 
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020Show More
Show More
... In spring​ 2019 the Irish Decorative Arts and History Museum in Dublin exhibited a number of works by the glass artist Alison Lowry. Curated by Audrey Whitty, (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths was conceived as a response to the legacy of Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes in Ireland – religious institutions which, together with former workhouses, orphanages and industrial schools, formed the basis of Irish society’s response to unmarried motherhood and the ‘problem’ of illegitimacy throughout most of the 20th century ...