So often Hals’s portrait subjects seem all too up for this charade, insufferably brash and loud. But it’s like any party: individuals are various, you hunt for those you get on with.
Reading
Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is interested in our relationship to the history we are living through, conscious that no one is fully aware of living in an historical epoch, perhaps as fictional figures can’t know they are in a story.
Since the 7 October attacks, it has become common for politicians and commentators, whatever their political orientation, to behave as if mourning is a limited commodity. The logic according to which a march for peace can’t exist alongside a remembrance ceremony is also a logic that rejects our capacity to mourn the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.
Any civilian government that wants to unify Myanmar society will face a conundrum: how to deal with the crimes committed by its own side without turning the groups that have joined together to fight the junta against one another.
Spiritual guidance is rare in Vernon Lee’s stories. Her ghosts are usually the undoing of those who encounter them; they represent compulsive desires rather than fears, and the glamour of history more than the anxieties of modern life. Lee’s tales speak for those who are in love with the past.
Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set of chains – and a mental environment, built out of the dominant images within which Byron’s figures live.
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
If we loosen our grip on suffering, discard any claim to own it, then perhaps we can ask a different question: how much pain can anyone hold in their mind at once? Must my pain always be greater than yours for it to count?
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 23 (Friday 17 November 2023)
After nearly two decades of relative calm along the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Israeli defence minister is threatening to do to Beirut what he is doing to Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, has warned Israel that if it ever attacks Beirut again Hizbullah will start bombing Tel Aviv and beyond.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 23 (Friday 17 November 2023)
All agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, though there are many differences of opinion among lawyers as to the basis for this. What no one contests, however, is that serious violations of humanitarian law by your opponent do not give you licence to do the same to them.
Nowadays, if this prodigy of wickedness is remembered at all, it is for an Alma-Tadema painting showing the emperor smothering his guests in a shower of roses. Polite society no longer tolerates the Orientalist racism of the older accounts but, more prosaically, everyone now knows that these stories are nonsense.
For the 13th-century Muslim scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini and his contemporaries, to contemplate the wonders of nature was to contemplate the majesty of God, so much so that cosmography was a mainstay of Islamic theology. But wonder was also an intellectual method. It acted as the initial stimulus for acquiring knowledge.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre.
The BBC released stills from the Doctor Who remaster of "The Daleks" in colour and wow, the floors are blue. Like... really, really BLUE!
The Lever speaks with cryptocurrency critic Molly White about the criminal trial of former cryptocurrency titan Sam Bankman-Fried.
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- by Philip Goff
- by Leif Weatherby
Details about the rapid U.S. military buildup since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza are largely unknown to the public and risk war with Iran, experts say.
The post Pentagon Won’t Say Where It’s Sending U.S. Troops — to Avoid Embarrassing Host Nations appeared first on The Intercept.
If the UK's First Past the Post electoral system can’t deliver its supposed advantages, why we are continuing with it?
Gabija Zemaityte and Danny Walker Inflation has been high in many countries since 2021. Some have said that companies have increased their profits over that period: so-called ‘greedflation’. We use published company accounts for thousands of large listed companies to look for signs of increased profits in the data. Consistent with previous analysis of aggregate … Continue reading Profits in a time of inflation: what do company accounts say in the UK and euro area?
Alicia Clegg reports on how Britain’s employment tribunals are not providing fair and equal access to justice