The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – has turned many political thinkers, including Richard Seymour, Dagmar Herzog, Christina Wieland, Claudia Leeb and Joan Braune, back to the puzzle that preoccupied Reich and other left Freudians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, that of the psychic allure of authoritarian strongmen, blood-and-soil nativism and ...

My Mother’s Prison

Daniella Shreir: Chantal Akerman’s Predicament, 19 March 2026

Oeuvre écrite et parlée, 1968-2015 
by Chantal Akerman, edited by Cyril Béghin.
L’Arachnéen, 1584 pp., £60, April 2024, 978 2 37367 022 6
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Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 1, 1967-78 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, February 2025Show More
Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 2, 1982-2015 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, June 2025Show More
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... and fifty dollars in my pocket’. In New York, she took in work by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and Yvonne Rainer. Babette Mangolte introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a loop: ‘a three-hour ...

The smallest details speak the loudest

John Upton: The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, 1 July 1999

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 
by Sir William Macpherson.
Stationery Office, 335 pp., £26, February 1999, 0 10 142622 4
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The Case of Stephen Lawrence 
by Brian Cathcart.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 670 88604 1
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... 1993, accompanied by his friend Duwayne Brooks. They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at ...

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

... in the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
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... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...
Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays 
by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller.
Liberty, 556 pp., $24, October 1991, 0 86597 094 7
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... was another name for ‘excellence’. In the campus emergency of 1968 he even publicly endorsed Richard Nixon. In general, however, Strauss eschewed official bromide or partisan pronouncement; that was the role not of the teacher but of the taught. The veiled pole star of Strauss’s journey through the past was Nietzsche, the one modern thinker who – he ...

What are we allowed to say?

David Bromwich, 22 September 2016

... only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... to which an actress will go to make it. Steffens is famous for having taken the lid off city hall corruption (‘Hell with the Lid Lifted’ was the title of a famous dispatch from Pittsburgh). His heroes were beggars, prostitutes and thieves. The world Steffens exposes is that of The Asphalt Jungle, the other Monroe film of the same year, where she ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
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... are a criminal . . . Jewish traitress! International agitator!’ She later wrote: ‘In the hall, everything became a mad scramble. The Stormtroopers attacked the audience with their chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury.’ The Nazi newspaper later called her ‘a flatfooted peace hyena’ with ‘no human physiognomy’; she ...