James Lasdun
John Burnside
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Deborah Friedell
James Butler
Times Literary Supplement (July 21, 2023) – Moral catastrophe – The great inflation in Germany in 1923 and the Hitler putsch; Pioneer’s in Women’s Sport; Colson Whitehead’s Harlem; Dangerous children; Dating The Tempest and Shakespreare’s tutor….
Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.
Times Literary Supplement (July 14, 2023) @TheTLS : The Republican presidential contenders; Noël Coward’s vortex; Techno-utopia; Too many elitists and more…
Times Literary Supplement (July 7, 2023): The national religion – NHS at seventy-five; The history of female combatants from ancient times to the present; The temptation for Romantic writers to tip into over-familiarity, and more…
The temptation for Romantic writers to tip into over-familiarity
Authorship and Romantic readers by Lindsey Eckert
In times of uncertainty, hardship or illness, re-reading a favourite novel can be a source of immense comfort. Even when we read something new, elements of familiarity – in plot, character and theme – can make us feel that the words have sprung from our subconscious. Familiarity connects us to our past and gives a sense of belonging to a community of readers. It can turn fictional characters into friends, make authors feel like confidants and render imagined settings as reassuring as a childhood home.
Literary Review – July 2023 Issue: Brushes with the Dutch Golden Age; @LauraCummingArt’s ‘Thunderclap’ – a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death’; Bismarck’s Great Gamble; Eden by Thames – The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London…
The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World By James Ball
Back in the mists of time, great idealism surrounded social media. There was a sense that global interconnection would shift us into a more egalitarian and democratic age. How time makes fools of us all.
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death By Laura Cumming
As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walking to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, especially, Pieter de Hooch.
I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel. When I finally started “The Fraud,” one principle was clear: no Dickens.
By Zadie Smith
For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself. First for Rome, then Boston, and then my beloved New York, where I stayed ten years. When friends asked why I’d left the country, I’d sometimes answer with a joke: Because I don’t want to write a historical novel. Perhaps it was an in-joke: only other English novelists really understood what I meant by it. And there were other, more obvious reasons.
We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative frame is also a cage?
By Parul Sehgal
After a millennium, she remains the hardest-working woman in literature. It was not enough to be saddled with a husband who had the nasty habit of marrying and murdering a new virgin every day to assure himself of spousal fidelity. Nor was it enough to produce a series of nested stories under such deadlines (truly, I complain too much), stories so prickly and tantalizing that the king postponed her murder every night to wait for the next installment. That’s to say nothing of the entirely forgotten three children she bore over those thousand and one nights. Who recalls that there was always a new baby in Scheherazade’s arms?
Emmanuel Carrère’s new book, Yoga, has been the subject of gossipy debate about its veracity, but it is seductively open about its own anxiety as a work of fiction.
Johannes Vermeer, one of the most intimate and quiet of artists, who is celebrated for the silence and light of his paintings, has become, paradoxically, a crowd-pleaser.
Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection by Gregor J.M. Weber
Vermeer and the Art of Love by Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Times Literary Supplement (June 30, 2023): Evelyn Waugh’s failed marriage and spiritual crisis; The police on trial; Grotesque, unbelievable murder; Lorrie Moore’s road trip; Levity in death and more….
In the end, godlike aspirations often met with all too human final moments.
By Mary Beard
One of the funniest works of Roman literature to survive—and the only one that has ever made me laugh out loud—is a skit, written by the philosopher Seneca, about the Emperor Claudius’ adventures on his way to Mt. Olympus after his death. Titled “Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii” (“The ‘Pumpkinification’ of the Deified Claudius”), it recounts how the Roman Senate declared that the dead Emperor was now a god, complete with his own temple, priests, and official rites of worship. The deification of emperors was fairly standard practice at the time, and the spoof claimed to lift the lid on what really happened during the process.
They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them?
