In Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s characters keep fabricating their own versions of reality, but their inventions are boxed in: lies, casting after ordinary plausibility, tend to resemble one another as much as they resemble truth.
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I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in...
The Ukrainian authorities ‘wanted Saakashvili to be in power’, so that he would ‘start a war against Russia and join Ukraine, involving Georgia in the war’. The opposition calls this scaremongering, but the message still resonates. As an American resident in Tbilisi pointed out, the government ‘is panicked that if Putin wins in Ukraine, they’re next. And if he loses, he’ll need a quick win somewhere, so they’d be next.’
The English had more ‘ship-smashing’ guns, more experienced gunners, better powder and more standardised shot. (The ‘Spanish’ Armada used pieces from foundries all over Europe, each with different regional pound standards.) The guns won the day. The weather did the rest.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 9 (Friday 21 April 2023)
The populists had emerged out of the nihilist milieu as its most committed revolutionaries, embracing an austere code of ethics. Like Kropotkin, they were motivated by modern science rather than Hegelian abstraction, and they wanted to move quickly from talk to action. But it wasn’t clear what that action should be.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 9 (Friday 21 April 2023)
If only the everyday were so richly textured, bright, precious and considered. Hannah Starkey’s photographs suggest that, given time and the right conditions, transformative details might bring forth meaning we didn’t know was there.
Mothering and other forms of intimate labour reproduce and sustain both capital and life; both workers and comrades; both patriarchal society and the possibility of liberation from it. In this sense, to say that life-preserving work (such as feeding, hoovering or wound-dressing) is ‘essential’ isn’t sufficient. The better question would be: essential for what?
The conceit of the novel is that it is a fictional biography, with fake footnotes, but real endnotes that reveal the sources Catherine Lacey used to create X, her wife and the world she lived in.
Comparisons to Proust and Henry James come up a lot when critics discuss Javier Marías, but we could also see his style, his performance, as something akin to a too-late Balzac, aided perhaps by a disciple of the Ancient Mariner. The prose has the extraordinary effect of making us simultaneously wonder why we’re still reading this garrulous stuff and how we could possibly stop.
In the absence of a plausible explanation, the list of acceptable ID seems to be a clumsy effort to favour the older, Conservative-tending voter at the expense of the younger and more Labour-inclined. What stands out about the voter ID saga as a whole, however, is not its repressive aspect but its shoddiness, its carelessness.
Her son is zigzagging on the lawn behind her house and he holds his new toy in his arms as if it is a babe in his arms.It is the Easy Disk – which is painless to catch, cuts through the...
For all Spotify’s talk of ‘discovery’, the thing it really cares about is what Mike, the chief scientist at Willow, calls ‘the hang-around factor’. If someone skips a song, or stops listening altogether, then something has gone wrong. You mustn’t bore the listener, but you mustn’t startle them either.
Neurologists are accustomed to breaking bad news. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s doctor was brisk and businesslike: ‘I’m going to come right out with it,’ she said. ‘I think you have multiple sclerosis.’
It’s difficult to argue that something is valuable in itself. But I’m not alone in finding the questions of pure philosophy both maddening and mesmerising.
The public and most of the press were suspicious of the reform from the start, simply because it meant revisiting the mystifying labyrinth of the pension system. Trade union actuaries and compute-your-pension calculators published in the French media have done sterling work, but nobody can say for sure what lies in store, except that many are liable to lose out.
It was the inattentive eye that saw them best:breeze-block vases with their tapered waists,their smoky pouts. They were modest,middle-distant; they had the permanenceof grey things: seen but...
Chris Ogden shows how the logical extension of banning the Chinese platform for its data collection would be to clamp down on other forms of social media, including Facebook and Google
‘This is the most fundamental attempt to change the DNA of the Labour Party in its entire history’
24-hour news, smartphones, social media, Simon Speakman Cordall explores how the incessant and diverting streams of news and comment are radicalising us all
We’ve just passed through tax time again. (Unless, like me, you live in one of several states ravaged by recent extreme weather events brought on by climate change. In that case, you can wait until October.) It’s also that moment when the War Resisters League — slogan: “If you work for peace, stop paying for war” — publishes its invaluable annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart and publicizes a series of Tax Day events nationwide. For many of the rest of us, it’s time to pat ourselves on the back for the charitable donations we made to tax-deductible organizations in 2022. Time to pat ourselves on the back for being clever and generous enough to “do... Read more
Source: A Deal With the Devil appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Local Sam Gorst must have Labour worried in new Garston ward – where none of their candidates live in the ward The Labour party has brought it’s disgraceful sewer-level campaigning tactics to Liverpool, mounting a frankly disgusting assault on south Liverpool councillor Sam Gorst, who is standing as an independent in the new Garston ward […]
Law Society says solicitors in England and Wales can ‘take into account the likely impact’ of their work upon the climate crisis when taking on new clients