I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
Show More
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
Show More
Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
Show More
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
Show More
Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
Show More
Show More
... in positions of power. It also takes place on the street. Vanessa Grigoriadis, a writer at the New York Times Magazine, had often been whistled at and cat-called as she walked through the city, but when researching her book on sexual harassment on campus in 2016, she noticed that men seemed to be stopping and harassing her even more than usual. Her father was ...

Union Sucrée

Perry Anderson: The Normalising of France, 23 September 2004

Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires 
by Daniel Lindenberg.
Seuil, 94 pp., €10.50, November 2002, 2 02 055816 5
Show More
Esquisse pour une auto-analyse 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Raisons d'Agir, 142 pp., €12, February 2004, 2 912107 19 9
Show More
La République mondiale des lettres 
by Pascale Casanova.
Seuil, 492 pp., €27.50, March 1999, 2 02 035853 0
Show More
Show More
... Italian political science. A country that has translated scarcely anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and could not even find a publisher for Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, might well be termed a rearguard in the international exchange of ideas.Yet if we turn to arts and letters, the picture is reversed. French literature itself may have ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... what we know of Freud’s actual clinical practice, which often shows a man, as his biographer Peter Gay put it, engulfed by a ‘rage to cure’. That rage is on disturbing display in Freud’s case study of ‘Dora’, an 18-year-old patient whose real name was Ida Bauer. During their sessions, Freud reports barraging Bauer with his diagnosis of her ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... The earlier novels of Forster were written in the same decade as James’s prefaces to the New York Edition of his novels. One might have expected the youthful Forster to be impressed by these remarkable exercises. For example, rereading What Maisie Knew elicited from the fluent master a full account of the genesis and maturing of his story, with special ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... nous of the Swiss – Henri Nestlé, Rodolphe Lindt, Jean Tobler, Philippe Suchard and Daniel Peter, the inventor of milk chocolate. Just before the end of the First World War, Cadbury and Fry undertook a defensive merger to protect themselves against takeover by Nestlé. It turned out Fry was worth much less than Cadbury; Cadbury accordingly became the ...

Courage, mon amie

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

... gym I belong to – became existential torture devices. No more Frasier reruns or baseball: just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It’s a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... of the last-mentioned one day and informed me – with a strange stare – that Julian Bream and Peter Pears were ‘pansies’.) In my current technological fix, however, it was obvious that the ancient family sound machine wasn’t up to much. The boombox was still non compos mentis. Forced to adopt emergency measures – under normal circumstances I ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... am not Dorian Nakamoto.’2 Other commentators, including Nathaniel Popper of the New York Times, named Nick Szabo, a cool cryptocurrency nut and the inventor of Bit Gold, but he denied it profusely. Forbes believed it was Hal Finney, who, the blockchain irrefutably showed, was the first person in the world to be sent bitcoin by Satoshi. Finney, a ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... had sold all six of her Victorian-style daguerreotypes and had been offered an internship in New York.‘Her soul was of a kind,’ said Betty Jackson, speaking of her sister Mary Mendy, Khadija’s mother. Their relative Demel Carayol, also an artist and a former member of the group Soul II Soul, was full of memories the day I tracked him down in Palmers ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... semi-autobiographical account of her experience at Rockland State Hospital, just north of New York City, The Snake Pit starred Olivia de Havilland as Virginia, a disturbed woman who gets caught inside the nightmare of asylum care, until she is rescued by a psychoanalytically informed psychiatrist. Much of the film focuses on the series of punishing ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... his working day: ‘On Friday morning when I arrived the flamboyant Mr Alfred A. Knopf of New York (Inc.) with brilliant tie and stickpin was filling the whole room talking to Morley, and then he collared me, and wasted most of the morning jawing about nothing.’ Eliot’s ear is cocked, recalling earlier instances of how a name can betray its ...

The Uninvited

Jeremy Harding: At The Rich Man’s Gate, 3 February 2000

... worker in Brunei; so is the teenage boy from Shanghai indentured to a Chinese crime ring in New York. Refugees, too, are migrants. Often they share their route to safety with others who are not seeking asylum: the smuggling syndicates known as snakeheads, which induct Chinese women into a life of semi-slavery in Europe and the US, also ran dissidents to ...

After Nehru

Perry Anderson, 2 August 2012

... of any earthly notion of time, announcing that the rest of the world was asleep: London and New York were wide awake – assured his broadcast listeners that their ‘tryst with destiny’ was consummated, and had given birth to the Indian Republic.After the ceremonies came practical arrangements. Within a fortnight, a Constituent Assembly had appointed a ...