5+ day, 16+ hour ago   (1751+ words) London Review of Books Beasts with Ravening Whelps Some books​ can be judged by their covers, others by their titles. The American edition of Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages is subtitled ‘What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (689+ words) My friend Jawad Ali, a Palestinian American lawyer, was at his daughter’s graduation last month when he got a call from his sister in the West Bank. ‘She was crying, almost hysterical,’ he said, as she told him that settlers…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1638+ words) London Review of Books There is nothing random about the cut-up. The released text always bears the signature of the surgeon. A cut-up by Gysin can never be mistaken for a cut-up by Burroughs. Gysin’s Stanley knife inspired the first…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1660+ words) London Review of Books Jaguars over the Seine Stained-glass​ windowpanes salvaged from Gorhambury, Francis Bacon’s 17th-century Hertfordshire residence, feature a cornucopia of flora and fauna, including tobacco plants, parrots and Indigenous men from North America, alongside mythical reclining river gods…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (287+ words) That hot harvest night when Chris is admiring herself in the mirror, she sees herself as ‘a third and last Chris’ too, sweet and cool and fit for that lover who would some day come and kiss her and hold…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (231+ words) Music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (258+ words) So, for Einstein, the attempt to grasp the world consists in the search not for the right words but for the right picture, a picture that would order other pictures, thereby becoming a dominant ‘concept’ capable of providing shape and…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1769+ words) London Review of Books That​ James Joyce had a political life might seem surprising. The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1627+ words) London Review of Books Afriendly ghost​ hovers over The Modern British City, the collaborative project of a crack team of historians of urban life. H.J. (Jim) Dyos died in 1978, still in his fifties, but as the UK’s first professor of…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago   (1757+ words) London Review of Books William Davies writes about the cost-of-living crisis In February 2022 two further economically significant events took place. At that month’s meeting of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, it was agreed that the bank would embark…...