The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 24 (Friday 01 December 2023)
Reading
It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through moral repugnance at the creation of the West German army and through the appearance of active ‘atonement’ movements, the way opened to wider empathies. ‘By the 1990s, German responsibility for the Holocaust had become a civil religion that defined national identity.’
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 24 (Friday 01 December 2023)
If Parliament deems Rwanda to be a safe third country, in the face of the Supreme Court judgment, it is rejecting and contradicting the ruling of our highest court on the facts, and thus infringing the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. As a matter of law, Parliament can pass any statute it likes and the courts must obey it, but this is only half the story.
Although they were designed to elevate the periphery by decentring the city, the villes nouvelles achieved the opposite effect: alienating a rapidly impoverished ring from the core. The suburban monorail project was abandoned in the 1970s, as was a highway a few years later. Commuting to Paris was difficult, if not impossible.
Alcmene gives birth to Hercules:By the third term I was so immensely swollenI could not see my feet, my womb stretchedand hanging to my knees. So when in the time of Capricornthe pains came on I...
One of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise.
R.B. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he also drew on the photographic reproductions that transformed art books during his lifetime, particularly those published by what he called the ‘old Jewish’ Phaidon Press.
Consent could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio tells Kate, with shrew-bashing relish, ‘your father hath consented/That you shall be my wife, your dowry ’greed on;/And, will you, nill you, I will marry you.’
The mop-haired Argentinian president, Javier Milei, has many well-known eccentricities. He claims to commune with his deceased dog through a spirit medium, and that four of the dogs he expensively cloned from the original pet offer him expert political and economic advice. But behind all this, there is a hard ideological core.
The Hutu authorities in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. Mukasonga’s literary project responds to this dehumanisation by reclaiming Tutsi life from the debris of Rwandan history.
American poets have never tired of the wonders of refrigeration. Ever since William Carlos Williams pilfered plums from the icebox there have been songs in praise of fridges and their contents – and why shouldn’t there be? Mary Ruefle’s poems make the most of such wonders.
This Other Eden is loosely based on what happened on Malaga Island, Maine in 1912, the same year that the first international congress on eugenics was held in London, at which Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, put forward ideas for ‘improving the breed of the race’ by eliminating inferior strains.
Monet was always more than just an eye. He was a painter of heart and brain, feeling and memory. Late in life, when working on his Water Lilies, he told his friend Gustave Geffroy: ‘They’re beyond the strength of an old man, but I want to succeed in rendering what I feel.’
In spite of various attempts to make Napoleon work as a biopic, the film doesn’t have a bio. It has a general of genius, something like a sports figure who is alive only in games or tournaments.
Dear Pam,
Thank you for thinking of me and my son for the past eleven years as you and the rest of your firm’s staff gather around to add your signatures and nothing else to the non-denominational Costco holiday cards you send out every December.
The jolly gender-neutral snowperson last year? Classic yet updated for this LGBTQ-inclusive era. The bluebird perched on an icy pinecone the year before? Timeless. The masked gingerbread people in various colors holding hands around the earth on 2020’s greeting? A subtle yet vital nod to the social unrest of that tough pandemic year.
Truly, it means so much that you haven’t forgotten us after the ten months and $62,302 worth of your expertise and advocacy that resulted in a Parenting Plan that requires me to deliver my only child once a week to a man who once drank a bottle of Wild Turkey and then broke into my public school classroom at nine-thirty in the morning while I was teaching a lesson on To Kill a Mockingbird to eighth graders.
In his twenties and thirties, Aldus Manutius was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious that he changed what reading meant?
In Indigenous Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia, feeding someone – whether human or animal – expressed a duty of care. Once tamed, animals lived alongside humans in companionable relationships. The purpose of taming was not exploitation, but the giving and receiving of affection.
The structural jumps and awkward sutures of time in The Fraud are part of its argument. They give additional force to its wider project of showing how the novels of the period 1840-80 were structurally unable to represent the interdependence of the British aristocracy and the slave trade.
By 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To...
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Rachel Reeves recently wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times in which she presented the Labour Party as the party of economic stability, and showed that she had the policies to prove it. Reeves began by slating Liz Truss and her disastrous ‘mini-budget’, claiming that this event showed beyond doubt that the Tories were the […]
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