During the second half of the 20th century the favoured metaphor for the effortless and detached exercise of power was ‘the push of a button’. It linked everyone from ordinary citizens through to the leaders of nations, for whom this same gesture could activate anything from an ice maker to nuclear war.

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work.

At the end of Something Speaks to Me, Michel Chaouli exhorts the reader to carry on the work of “poetic criticism” that his book has been advocating. Now, he says, it’s “Your turn”.

In a world where many currencies circulate, one of them invariably comes out on top. Great prestige accrues to the country that issues the dominant currency. The issuer enjoys other advantages besides, such as the ability to borrow at lower interest rates, and weaker constraints on how much it can borrow.

This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here.

The notion of the universe as a book, an ancient trope that Ernst Robert Curtius traced in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), works in both directions. If the universe is a book, then the book is the universe, since (in scriptural terms) God is the Author of both.

In early May 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company that was waging a fierce battle for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, posted a video tirade on social media showing himself walking through rows of corpses.

In early May 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company that was waging a fierce battle for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, posted a video tirade on social media showing himself walking through rows of corpses.

In this interview with LSE Review of Books Managing Editor Anna D’Alton, Danny Dorling discusses his new book,The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future which examines survey data on what worries the public most, finding that the answers can differ significantly from what’s in the headlines.

For those interested in how digital technology contributes to the general clusterfuck most of us are experiencing these days, here is a list of texts I read last year. These recommendations form a solid base with which to face the current wave of authoritarian tech bullshit, including the idea that there is or was ever anything inherently democratic in it.