Very Inbred

Helen McCarthy: Coeducation Revolutions, 10 May 2018

‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation 
by Nancy Weiss Malkiel.
Princeton, 646 pp., £22.95, May 2018, 978 0 691 18111 0
Show More
Show More
... coast in order to vote against the admission of women. He died just five weeks later. Going mixed may have felt traumatic for many men, but it raised existential questions for the women’s colleges. Like their male peers, young women were becoming less keen on single-sex institutions. As Ivy League universities moved to admit women, top schools like ...

My wife brandishes circle and line

Anne Wagner: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 6 December 2018

Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the Avant Garde: A Biography 
by Roswitha Mair, translated by Damion Searls.
Chicago, 222 pp., £41.50, September 2018, 978 0 226 31121 0
Show More
Show More
... from Germany on the last train to France. He was lucky not to be arrested as a German spy. In May 1915, he arrived in Zurich, where he met Taeuber. As the painter Hans Richter put it, ‘She was Arp’s discovery, just as he was hers.’ ‘Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles’ (1930) Both Taeuber and Arp found a place among the Zurich ...

At Tate Modern

Eleanor Nairne: Nam June Paik, 21 November 2019

... was apparently inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two cosmic heads – Buddha and spaceman – may be inert but they seem to be watching each other. As you walk past TV Buddha (1974), you glimpse yourself in the background of the video, caught up for a moment in their silent exchange. Nam June Paik’s ‘TV Buddha’ (1974) Works about surveillance ...

I love her to bits

Deborah Friedell: ‘The Testaments’, 7 November 2019

The Testaments 
by Margaret Atwood.
Chatto, 419 pp., £20, September 2019, 978 1 78474 232 4
Show More
Show More
... And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. Atwood’s narrator has recently been renamed ‘Offred’, as in ‘Of Fred’, the name of the Sons of Jacob ‘commander’ who regularly attempts to inseminate her, Jacob and Bilhah style, while she lies on top of his ...

The Head in the Shed

Gavin Francis: Reading Bones, 21 January 2021

Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind 
by Sue Black.
Doubleday, 359 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 85752 690 8
Show More
Show More
... about the forensic relevance of bones, speaks to the difficulty of assessing how old a bone may be (as she says, ‘setting up a murder investigation based on Roman remains is not likely to result in a solved case’). The speed with which the flesh of a corpse melts from the bone varies greatly depending on temperature, soil type and scavenger ...

Shy bairns get nae sweets

Andrew O’Hagan: Among the Oil-Riggers, 21 January 2021

Sea State 
by Tabitha Lasley.
Fourth Estate, 227 pp., £14.99, February 2021, 978 0 00 839093 8
Show More
Show More
... to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.She may be in love, but she’s also on assignment, and the originality of the book lies in the way these states of being become inseparable. In a sense, she’s like the men she’s writing about, the oil workers who live two lives, one at home, one away, and her ...

Diary

Carlos Dada: At the Mexican Border, 8 October 2020

... he was going to be killed. His best friend, a fellow schoolteacher called Oliver, was beheaded in May 2019. Ngu had enemies on both sides: he’d received death threats from the Anglophone separatist movement, and Biya’s soldiers had beaten him so badly that his body could be identified months later in Mexico by the scars.Siglo XXI, an overcrowded migrant ...

Diary

Fleur Macdonald: In Conakry, 22 October 2020

... in Africa was a class issue, rather than a race issue. He was on the streets of Paris during May 1968, where he was singled out by the police and beaten, escaping with a broken nose.He returned to Guinea frequently, however, to visit Sékou Touré, leader of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG). In the 1950s Touré appeared to be the unifying figure ...

Thom Gunn in New York

Michael Nott, 22 October 2020

... final few weeks and his death, ‘this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise’. That May, Noseworthy had called Gunn from Palm Springs – where he was living with his new boyfriend, the porn star Richard Locke – and told him he had Kaposi’s sarcoma. A few days later, he arrived in San Francisco to get treatment. Gunn moved into his study ...

Philanthropic Imperialism

Stephen W. Smith, 22 April 2021

... feared that the departing coloniser would leave them at the mercy of sedentary majorities. On 30 May 1958, a number of dignitaries claiming to speak for Tuaregs and ‘Moors’ – people of Berber and Arab descent – living on the bend of the Niger River wrote an open letter to de Gaulle, addressing him as ‘Your Majesty the President’. They declared ...

Drama of the Gowns

Lisa Cohen, 22 April 2021

Patch Work: A Life amongst Clothes 
by Claire Wilcox.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 1 5266 1439 1
Show More
Show More
... politics, protocol and power’. In Patch Work, the museum – as employer and physical place – may be a place of paradoxes, but it isn’t a site of contestation. Imprisoned women, she notes near the end of the book, made some of the building’s mosaic floor tiles, adding in parentheses: ‘The museum loves that story.’ Coming ‘from trade’ (her ...

Diary

Mendez: Bingeing on ‘Drag Race’, 27 July 2023

... the difference between drag and trans expression.Part of my delayed engagement with Drag Race may have been down to residual shame, having grown up with Section 28 and as a Jehovah’s Witness. It might also have had something to do with a misguided notion that the show was lowbrow and had nothing to teach me. But I came to see Drag Race as amounting to ...

Aha!

Liam Shaw: Plant Detectives, 7 September 2023

Planting Clues: How Plants Solve Crimes 
by David J. Gibson.
Oxford, 237 pp., £18.99, August 2022, 978 0 19 886860 6
Show More
Show More
... turmoil means that there are secret motions, out of sight, that lie concealed in matter … you may be sure this starts with atoms’). But this inference, whether Lucretian or Brownian, remained a qualitative insight. It said nothing about the real size of the invisible atoms. Even at the turn of the 20th century, a young Albert Einstein was frustrated ...

Antidote to Marx

Colin Kidd: Oh, I know Locke!, 4 January 2024

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life 
by Claire Rydell Arcenas.
Chicago, 265 pp., $25, October, 978 0 226 82933 3
Show More
Show More
... a class of hereditary serfs called ‘leet men’. The only countervailing feature – one that may suggest Locke’s influence – was a very generous measure of religious toleration; atheists alone were barred from landholding. More telling still on the matter of Locke’s authorship, in 1671 the Lords Proprietors rewarded his efforts in shaping the ...

Reduced to a Lego Block

Sarah Resnick: Eva Baltasar’s ‘Mammoth’, 5 December 2024

Mammoth 
by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches.
And Other Stories, 103 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 916751 00 2
Show More
Show More
... is a ‘plank of wood with a hole in the middle’ and there’s no shower or bath. Her new home may seem inhospitable, but the narrator finds that focusing on the essentials banishes her ‘more trivial thoughts’. And then there’s the surrounding landscape, which ‘dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to ...