News and reviews
Dana El Kurd writes in the Guardian
Added on 27/01/2025
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza, much of the world has focused on the immediate impacts of destruction in the strip. The discussion has been focused on which bodies will administer aid, how reconstruction might start, the role of international actors and the terms of the fragile ceasefire.
READ MOREVatican Spies reviewed in the Mail on Sunday
Added on 26/01/2025
In the early 1990s a Catholic deacon called Yvon Bertorello was sent to train for four years at the Minerva, a college run by the Vatican to prepare its top priests for overseas postings.
READ MOREThe Brothers Grimm reviewed in the TLS
Added on 24/01/2025
Scholars are difficult subjects for the biographer, since they spend – or fantasize about spending – most of their time at their desks. Jacob Grimm was a particularly reclusive character; his more outward-going brother Wilhelm was often debilitated by ill health. Yet the two produced a prodigious body of work, of which the famous Tales are only a tiny fragment.
READ MORERichard Seymour writes in the New Statesman
Added on 24/01/2025
Los Angeles is burning in the middle of winter. The fires are still not fully contained, and the Santa Ana winds fuelling them returned this week. Over 40,000 acres have been burned, 200,000 people have been evacuated, more than 12,000 homes and buildings have been destroyed and more than 27 people dead, with many more missing. This is just one city.
READ MOREIgnorance and Bliss reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
Added on 23/01/2025
In “Ignorance and Bliss,” Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, suggests that our passionate quest for knowledge is inextricable from our anxious retreat from ignorance. We want to both know and not know—and “playing hide-and-seek with ourselves can become a perilous game.”
READ MOREWaste Land reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 22/01/2025
Weimar, the short-lived German republic preceding the Third Reich, has always provided a convenient broadside for conservatives of every stripe. It stands as a parable of reckless effulgence, the image of a society unaware of its own need for order and state power and so doomed to be visited by state power in its most vengeful and cruel form.
READ MOREBen Alderson-Day writes in the Guardian
Added on 21/01/2025
Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence this week heralds the return of a cinematic technique familiar to many fans of scary movies: the point-of-view shot. Viewing a scene through the eyes of an antagonist – such as the extended opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween – can be a chilling way of drawing viewers into the action, making us feel like we are both the watcher and being watched.
READ MOREThe Well-Connected Animal reviewed in Nature
Added on 20/01/2025
“It’s time to scratch off another item from the ‘what makes humans unique’ list,” concludes biologist Lee Dugatkin. Animals, too, have complex social networks — as his entertaining book about species around the world demonstrates. A vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), for instance, shares more blood with a starving one if the latter had been generous with food when the former was hungry.
READ MOREThe Bloomsbury Photographs reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Virginia Woolf disliked being photographed, painted or sculpted. Posing for both Stephen Tomlin and Vanessa Bell during a single day in 1931, she complained afterwards of feeling like “a piece of whalebone bent”, and fled Tomlin’s sitting before he had a chance to finish the sculpture.
READ MORETulips and Peacocks reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylized designs that are often botanically impossible, yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art.
READ MOREGlobal Marxism reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Apart from Christianity, Islam and perhaps liberalism, no ideology has had more global influence on political and social organization than Marxism. A generation ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, many believed that influence was likely to vanish. Yet it lives on.
READ MORETo Overthrow the World reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Apart from Christianity, Islam and perhaps liberalism, no ideology has had more global influence on political and social organization than Marxism. A generation ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, many believed that influence was likely to vanish. Yet it lives on.
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