From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced.
Popes used to control vast areas of Italy – the so-called “papal states”. But when the unification of Italy was finally completed after the capture of Rome in 1870, only about 120 acres of central Rome were left in papal possession. Popes railed against the Italian state until the Lateran Pacts were signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929, when each side recognised the other and the theocratic Vatican City was created.
One of my school students, Sam, comes to my Monday English clinic to work on his close reading. He expresses frustration at the process, which seems unnecessarily mysterious to him. He knows that there is some correspondence between the details he might observe in a given passage and the quality of the analysis he produces. If I could give him a step-by-step guide to how to do it, he says – a list of things to look for – then maybe he could get better at it.
We are sometimes inclined to compare our own imperfect times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century: global elites wielding extraordinary political and economic power, a yawning gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, cities plagued with shocking inequalities.
In seventeenth-century England, people often commented after a meal: “We ourselves have had ourselves upon our trenchers”. This is an early version of today’s well-worn aphorism, ‘you are what you eat’. In Eating and Being, historian Steven Shapin explores this idea and how philosophies of food have shaped the Western sense of self.
Misogyny and male supremacy might lie at the heart of far-right ideology but that does not mean women are absent from such movements – with some caught up in the race riots that exploded across the UK this summer.
Carlsberg, the brewing giant whose presence in Russia transformed that country’s beverage market, has left. What remains is the lingering residue of a boozy party that peaked too soon, ended in a brawl and left many questions dangling.
One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of our age, Martin Rowson has a decades-long written record of equally skilful takedowns of the world’s many hypocrisies and hypocrites, proving to the detractors that cartoonists can write. Shock, horror!
As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.
Norman Holmes Pearson was a familiar mid-twentieth-century academic: a popular teacher, active committee member and organizer of conferences who never quite finished his major book. He spent his life in the Yale English department, and collected rare books and manuscripts, while fostering relationships with poets, colleagues and students at home and abroad. Born into New England’s upper-middle class, he married into the wealthy Winchester rifle family. When Greg Barnhisel began this biography, a colleague asked: “Why would you want to write about him?”