The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... be processed or shunted back through the conveniently sited Channel Tunnel rail link. In this gold-rush land-grab of flexible futures – hyper-mosques, evangelical cathedral-warehouses (£13.5 million was offered to the Kingsway International Christian Centre to move off the nine-acre site it was illegally occupying), disposable stadia – legacy is all ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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... speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable fumbling and rush of any inexperienced teenage male, though he was especially horrified at the loss of physical self-possession at the moment of climax.’ Woodall points then to a reference to this disastrous sexual initiation in Borges’s story ‘The Other’, published ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... from conservative evangelicals, but also from those hungering for the kind of America evoked in Norman Rockwell’s paintings The Four Freedoms: an America that is godly, that cherishes traditional values, that rests firmly on the family, an America that is safe.Many who cherish such notions – like many of those who supported Brexit hoping it would ...