When Carmen Callil chose the name Virago for the publishing house she founded in 1973, she was daring all comers in a spirit of defiant wit (with an accompanying gleeful cackle). Grasping an...
Elizabeth Hardwick had a great command of pattern and some of her characterisations jingle like a good ad: Frost was ‘malicious and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’;...
Marx, Mike Davis says near the beginning of Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory, ‘never wrote a single word about cities, and his passionate interests in ethnography, geology and mathematics...
We live in a world, as Stuart Hall put it, in which one can be just as ‘committed’ a revolutionary as Marx or Lenin, but ‘every now and then – Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration...
Gay men beginning to act on their desires in the 1950s faced any number of difficulties and dangers but could benefit from a certain invisibility. Their status was unspeakable, but at least it was unspoken.
Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained...
It can be hard to grasp how ambitious the synthesis that Julian Huxley tried to provide actually was. In his hands, evolution became emphatically a story of progress, especially human progress. ‘Because...
Poring over family stories to give meaning to our lives is something most of us do. For the descendants of people who have survived traumatic historical events, it takes on an added intensity – and,...
The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony to a character...
Yoga, whose New Agey message wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1970s, is about the struggle to accept the fact that you can’t mute your ego, either in the interest of peace and love, or in the...
Hoarding is a modern malady. The excessive accumulation of objects was once considered a moral failure or a species of sin, but it was still thought to be fundamentally rational: in a world without much...
Jules Renard was a brilliant noticer of things. Distinguishing quirks and concrete observations usually take precedence over broader typologies. ‘The man of science generalises,’ he wrote, ‘the artist...
For minor kings and junior dynasts, the extra-European world was a place to amass wealth or responsibilities denied them at home. But they didn’t get to perform these fantasies of empire under conditions...
Words, Isidore Isou thought, had done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing them as a collection of arbitrary symbols, he hoped to make space for a new language to emerge....
Bohumil Hrabal’s books are cycles, rips, rondos, fugues. They are like bandages, swatches, masking tape; improvised in layers, courting repetition, bluff, deferring, concealing, insatiable and endless....
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ was always the first question you were asked by those who had never done it, but I don’t recall the issue ever coming up with fellow travellers. It was in everybody’s interest...
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s diaries and letters demonstrate over and over again how important it was to her that she immerse herself in a milieu or environment. She felt identity above all as a relation....
Lea Ypi recovers the sensory world of communist Albania: its privations, its ecstasies, but also its banalities. Young people in Albania fretted over what to wear to school just like children elsewhere....