Take a Cold Bath

Lucy Wooding: Chastity or Fornication?, 6 March 2025

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 660 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 241 40093 7
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... impulse could create. As late as the 20th century, the Skoptsy sect in Russia was still preaching self-mutilation as the godly response to sexual cravings. Christian authorities in every age have defended their teachings by reference to the Bible. MacCulloch patiently explains the many problems with this, in a fashion that will no doubt leave biblical ...

Commencing Demagogues and Ending Tyrants

Colin Kidd: What’s wrong with the electoral college, 24 October 2024

How to Steal a Presidential Election 
by Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman.
Yale, 162 pp., £25, April, 978 0 300 27079 2
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... Too often in history, it was argued, the vigilance and civic virtue required to sustain republican self-rule had dissipated, and the ensuing corruption, chaos and division had paved a path to dictatorship for a Caesar or a Cromwell. Republican government wasn’t thought compatible with territorial extent on the American scale. Small city-states had proved ...

Diary

Mendez: My Niche, 4 July 2024

... I was being paid to say what was there, not to critique it; but, where I could, I inserted a self-deprecating inflection, leaving my tongue in the great man’s cheek. These days, I usually get a couple of weeks with the manuscript before recording, to check pronunciations, especially pertinent with, for example, Brazilian Portuguese, which can be a ...

An Amazing Week in New Zealand

Bill Manhire, 2 December 1993

... crazy parties, leopardskin pants and a pony-tail. But now her parents are puzzled. Where is their self-centred daughter? She hasn’t gone to town. Come on. You come down. * The publican wants God as a partner, the businessman, the wife, oh the girl with scars on her wrists taking her baby to God the shiftless drunk no one trusts who lives in a packing shed ...

The Unholy One?

Tom Paulin, 11 December 1997

... more like Creon – wrote that is for what Hegel calls the daylight gods – the gods of free self-conscious social – social and political – life the gods if you like of middle-class conversation its Fabian certainties its brisk of course that’s often slightly off course like the old Belfast story – that over-troped sea-chestnut of the liner and ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘No Time to Die’, 21 October 2021

... but before the camera sees her above water she has turned into another person: her grown-up self, swimming in a different latitude. She is Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), from Spectre, now living happily with a retired Bond in Jamaica. I’m not sure what to make of this shift of twenty years or so between shots, but it’s certainly memorable, and ...

In Hereford

Mary Wellesley: The Mappa Mundi, 21 April 2022

... bonnacon is shown expelling faeces, a feat which, the inscription notes, it commonly performs in self-defence.The map’s humanoid creatures are some of its most compelling. There are dog-headed men (seemingly engaged in conversation) as well as a ‘monocule’ or Sciapod: a man with only one foot, extended into the air. He cuts a lonely figure, as does the ...

After Zarqawi

Patrick Cockburn: Another spurious turning point in Iraq, 6 July 2006

... part of the war on terror. The US elevation of Zarqawi to the front rank of al-Qaida leaders was self-fulfilling. To many Iraqis and Muslims wanting to fight the US, he became a symbol of resistance. His notoriety made it easy for him to raise money. In December 2004, Osama bin Laden declared that he was head of al-Qaida in Iraq. ‘The Islamists often seem ...

At the Ashmolean

John-Paul Stonard: Joseph Beuys and Jörg Immendorff , 22 May 2014

... on themes from Hogarth, which included some wonderful late flourishes, role-playing (many are self-portraits) and memorable images. The florid iconography and symbolism of the Café Deutschland series spills over into the late works, but without the political imperative the vitality somehow dwindles. One of the most striking paintings in the Ashmolean ...

At Notre Dame de Lorette

Gavin Stamp: The International Memorial , 20 November 2014

... merit, most of them gratuitously concerned with the Second World War and so helping to sustain the self-justifying national myth: Women of the Second World War, Animals in War, Bomber Command etc. Then there is the Armed Forces Memorial in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, unveiled in 2007: an impressive circular structure in which a diluted ...

At the Hayward

Rosemary Hill: David Shrigley, 23 February 2012

... general human and animal condition. This is less true of the other work in the show, in which the self-deprecating humour extends to the teasing deprecation of some of his fellow artists and indeed the viewer. One of the ways in which Shrigley offends against the tenets of much contemporary art practice is that he admits to presenting a persona in his ...

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: Kraft eats Cadbury, 7 January 2010

... manifestations, because they are so humble, so daily, because people don’t use them as a form of self-definition, and because the differences between them are real: a Crunchie is not just a differently packaged Mars bar – it’s a genuinely different thing. Consumers will have sincerely held differing opinions about their merits. Added to this is the fact ...

At the Gagosian

Peter Campbell: ‘Crash’, 11 March 2010

... more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.’ In the catalogue Will Self writes of Ballard’s ability to see the nature of what has grown up around us: ‘Bleak man-made landscapes, technological, social and environmental developments and their psychological effects – these are aspects of the dystopian society we all live in ...

Is that it for the NHS?

Peter Roderick: Is that it for the NHS?, 3 December 2015

... budgets to individual GP practices); the replacement of health authorities by ‘NHS trusts’ (self-governing accounting centres with borrowing powers, and their own finance, human resources and PR departments) and the splitting of purchasers from providers (the planning and delivery of services was to be undertaken by separate bodies, with the money ...

At the Watts Gallery

Julian Bell: Richard Dadd , 30 July 2015

... asymmetry that fractured the psychological monotony, touching some faultline in his subject’s self-possession. He must surely be a fool – this guileless, posh young Londoner, this obverse of Ingres’s Monsieur Bertin – to allow himself to be so immobilised. See how, in his slouch, his figure balloons away from that absurd little apex of a head, his ...