TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Philip Zelikow and Anchit Sathi on progress, AI and the death of the author…..
When doctors and families fall out over medical intervention By Charles Foster
Looking at John Berger By Margaret Drabble
Can literary culture survive in the era of machine intelligence? By Anchit Sathi
Why nations win or lose the technological race By Philip Zelikow
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
By Colin Burrow
What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing a work of literary criticism, as they happily did in the 1970s and 1980s. Even literary biography, literary criticism’s previously marketable stepsister, no longer brings a gleam to a publisher’s eye. The grassroots of the subject are also suffering badly. Since 2000 the number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third, to around 36,000, with an even higher drop among male students.
COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features…
Edward Impey admires the ambitious attempt to revive early-12th-century interiors at Norwich Castle keep in Norfolk
What did the Normans ever do for us?
Jason Goodwin examines how the 1066 invasion by William the Conqueror changed the character of England forever
Walk on the wild side
Nicholas Crane re-creates the 1,000-mile, 12th-century journey undertaken by Gerald of Wales, Britain’s first great travel writer
Architecture as power
The monumental castles and churches the Normans left behind still express their strength in stone, reveals John Goodall
That sinking feeling
Quicksand is the stuff of many a nightmare. Harry Pearson tries not to get sucked in
Arts & antiques
Artists have long been inspired by the Battle of Hastings, as Carla Passino discovers
Michael Whitehall’s favourite painting
The podcast co-host chooses an arresting work expressing movement and fleeting beauty
Save our seeds
Seed Detective Adam Alexander issues an appeal to gardeners to revive the Victorian tradition of gathering life-giving pips
The legacy
The fossil-hunter Mary Anning helped put palaeontology front and centre, finds Kate Green
Country-house treasure
The golden Jean Tijou gates at Burghley House in Lincolnshire catch the eye of John Goodall
New series: Countryside mysteries
In the first of a series on rural riddles, John Wright cracks the old conundrum of strip lynchets
Yell for leather
Corinne Julius meets the animal-hide experts conserving historic objects from their Leicester HQ
You little cracker
The neglected Kentish cobnut is making an overdue come-back, suggests Susan Low
Luxury
The runway returns and Amie Elizabeth White’s earthy tones
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe picks out elegant fittings to elevate the bathroom
Will Hosie asks what makes a pub a pub and eyes properties with a pop of colour, plus our writers have all you need to know this month and Gio Fio marvels at the reinvention of the north bank of the Thames
Out on the prairie
American plants may be the answer to our warming climate, reports Charles Quest-Ritson
Travel
Pamela Goodman roots around in the Nadder Valley in Wiltshire
MONTHLY REVIEW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘India’s Ruling Class and the Global Crisis’….
In recent years, India’s ruling classes claimed—and perhaps came to believe—that their time had come on the world stage. India was the fastest-growing major economy, due soon to be the third largest, constituting a new global power. India’s biggest tycoons figured among the world’s top twenty billionaires, part of the transnational elite. Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India would be a “developed country” by 2047, the centenary of the end of colonial rule.
It’s getting on for twenty-four years ago that I first read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Books tend to come to us when we need them, and it’s easy to see why Tom Ripley’s project of self-reinvention and triumphant class resentment was so appealing to me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate.
Few groups in history have been so variously defined, quarrelled over, misrepresented and appropriated as the Vikings. Their identity elusive, they have been passed around like historiographical tokens to the detriment of a deeper understanding of their cultural and political milieu. Neil Price’s The Sea-King and the Sorceress sidesteps these often sterile debates by examining the lives – and deaths – of more than twenty figures from the Viking Age and using them to shed light on wider themes, a bottom-up approach which is both logical and engaging.
A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently from the salons of Cairo to the palaces of Riyadh, from Atatürk’s Ankara to Khomeini’s Najaf, while keeping so many figures vividly in play.
When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days as his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci thought his career was over. He had become such an object of ridicule that a crisis PR adviser suggested he lie low for a few years before attempting to start again. Instead, the self-styled ‘front stabber’ from New York – who had naively assumed that a successful Wall Street career could equip him for the toxic political swamp of Washington, DC – launched himself into a round of media interviews, choosing to roll with the punches.
Gordon Cullen’s drawings for Townscape, his guide to urban planning, lend the subject a beguiling romanticism
The long-running fair dedicated to Italian art rests on the quality of its pre-19th-century offerings – and there’s much to delight here
Paintings made during the struggle for unification and independence are a niche interest abroad, but a few gems have risen to the top
Businesses of all sizes might be forced to go back to basics if they want to survive
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 8.30.26 Issue features Charles Homans on Democratic Socialists; Chien-Chi Chang on civil-defense drills in Taiwan; Jon Ronson on Greg Chism’s strange journey with YouTube; and more.
Her latest novel appears to savage a celebrity. But Cusk has, once again, managed to turn herself into the victim.
In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem. By Susan Dominus
I traveled around the country to find out if “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” still has a place in the classroom. By Ruth Franklin
The word today applies to more than religious sects, but it says something about our worshipful attitude toward consumption. By Sophie Haigney
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features “Nicole Rifkin’s “Pure Gold” – We will always love you.
Dolly Parton belonged to a beloved category: the outlaw Christian, who loved Jesus and refused to hate anyone else.
Why do we love trash and hate slop? Neil Breen’s so-bad-they’re-great movies elucidate the difference.
Flash floods, triggered by a glacial collapse in the Himalayas, have killed at least five hundred people in a nation that has contributed little to climate change but is disproportionately affected by it. By Ishaan Tharoor
Even while refusing to admit legal fault, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children. By Nathaniel Lubin
The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘No End In Sight’ – The AI bubble is unlikely to burst anytime soon. We break it down.
The spending on artificial intelligence will end, but probably not when investors suspect it will.
The Fed chairman told his audience that lower prices are a firm goal.
The company’s new chairman “deserves nothing but accolades,” one analyst says. But there is one blemish on his report card: the lagging stock.
After months of military and trade conflicts, investors might expect an impact on the stock market. It hasn’t happened.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER MAGAZINE: ‘25 Years After 9/11′ – Lessons not learned about Islamic terrorism…
Islamist propagandists have bombarded Americans for two and a half decades, taking advantage of our tolerance, and have persuaded much of the decent public that criticizing, opposing, and pushing back against Islam is racist. By Hugo Gurdon
In countless American minds, Brexit and President Donald Trump are linked, and not in a good way.
Intellicurious 