What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... the last dot. When I reached Schiff’s final editorial note (‘John Updike died in hospice on 27 January, in Danvers, Massachusetts’), I got a thump in my chest, an echo of the one I felt when the news of his death first hit the wires. But then I had grown up reading the guy.If Updike​ has fallen out of fashion, it’s partly because the vision of ...

After the Fall

John Lanchester: Ten Years after the Crash, 5 July 2018

... Then the book came out, and I was giving talks about it all over the place from its publication in January 2010 through the spring and summer, and there was this mysterious lack of rage. People seemed numb and incredulous but not yet angry. In July 2010 I was in Galway for the arts festival, giving a talk in a room where, I later learned, a former taoiseach ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... they were unable to take breaks. Memos between managers at Southmead Hospital in Bristol in early January, leaked to the local press, warned that beds were ‘104 per cent full’: ‘Patients are admitted to any available bed,’ the hospital’s clinical director wrote. ‘Speciality patients are scattered.’ At that point, with all overflow beds ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... the way she met Blücher, a non-Jewish former Spartacist and sex-club bouncer, whom she married in January 1940. In September 1939, Blücher and Benjamin were interned together at Nevers, though Blücher was released early, only to be interned again a few months later. This time the order included women. On 15 May 1940 Arendt showed up at the Vélodrome ...

‘Everything is possible’

James Meek: In Greenland, 17 April 2025

... the president is only being provocative.‘The first time [Trump said he wanted Greenland], in 2019, people were upset. They said: “Hey, we’re not for sale.” But then it kind of blew over quickly. This time it definitely made more of an impact. We try to stay out of it, but people ask us what we think … We want what’s best for Greenland. I want ...

Purges and Paranoia

Ella George, 24 May 2018

... The elections​ due to be held on 24 June, brought forward abruptly from the end of 2019 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, come after a period of repression and fear that represents the most serious rupture in the history of the Turkish republic. In the last two years more than 100,000 people have been detained, and tens of thousands are waiting for their lives to be upended by a knock on the door, or the publication of a new emergency decree ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action Group blog from January 2016. In a blog posting in November 2016, the action group’s long history of accusations against the council and the TMO came to a head. ‘It is a truly terrifying thought,’ the blog said, ‘but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a ...