Buchi Emecheta said that all her books were about survival, but survival doesn’t always mean gritting your teeth. Sometimes it means acting the tourist for a day, skipping the royal press conference for a Vespa ride through Rome, leaving your kids a note saying you’re joining the circus.
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You step inside the bathroom and shut the door.
You lock the door.
Get a good look at yourself in the dim lighting. You look great. Remember this because you’re about to look more vulnerable than a baby antelope at the watering hole during lion lunch hour.
Unsnap (they’re always snaps) the top two snaps. Then, resnap them.
You go back to the door. Double-check to make sure that it is locked. Jiggle the handle. Shake it.
Once you’re sure it’s locked, unsnap all the snaps and zipper (there’s always a zipper too), and slide your arms out of the sleeves. Unpeel yourself, you big, stupid banana.
Look down at your chest: you’re either wearing the bra you’ve had for too long and that you tell people you wash, but you’ve never washed it, because you’re worried it’ll lose some of the comfort it brings you. Or you’re completely naked. There is no in between.
Hold the top of the jumpsuit under the back of your thighs so that it’s not touching the floor (gross) and also not touching the toilet (gross). This will be difficult but necessary.
A crown decayed or unfinished. Disarticulated bricks. An echo.The cannon face the rolling breakers,aiming at the line where sky and sea collude.What do they defend? The wild enclosure,which for...
One thing Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is sure of is that there is no such thing as completion, or a fresh start. Many of its images are variations on the theme of traces, leftovers, the aspects of self or history you can’t quite redeem or get rid of.
Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.
Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug.
The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more. ‘Hollywood’ (if you are prepared to believe that kingdom still exists) doesn’t know how to deliver a pointed universality that can upset us.
‘Make Hungary Great Again’ is an effective summation of Orbánism; many Hungarians would like back the tracts of territory lost with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War.
Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.
China’s sheer size, and the revival of decentralised decision-making since the early post-Mao decades, means that a great deal of economic statecraft occurs at lower levels: provinces, cities, districts, counties, townships and so on.
A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes – broken toys, bank statements, vodka bottles, handwritten notes – float serenely into the jaws of the machines.
The notion of existential lack, of a hole that yearns to be filled, of the human need to be made whole through connection with another, is a fundamental and recurrent preoccupation in Coetzee’s fiction.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 5 (Friday 23 February 2024)
There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 5 (Friday 23 February 2024)
Using the judiciary to lock up Imran Khan on trivialities, technicalities and a treason charge had only one purpose: to keep him out of the picture.
There were strong currents of populist ‘anti-globalism’ in the interwar years and plenty of political leaders eager to whip up feeling for nationalist and often nefarious ends. But the 1920s were different from the 1930s in this regard: only in the 1930s and under the impact of the Depression did a fairly toxic brew of nativism and nationalism gain the upper hand.
The Weimar Republic was a ‘great crossroads of modernism’, where cultural innovators from many countries mingled, experimented and lived in defiance of convention. All this was destroyed when the Nazis came to power in 1933, in an orgy of murderous violence against their opponents.
At the heart of Brian Cummings’s Bibliophobia is a sense of the book as a ‘liminal object’, by which Cummings means that the book is both vessel and object, something that carries and something that is: ‘a transaction between physical and mental universes’.
Among all the new forms of Conservatism springing up in the run up to the next election, Kruger's New Conservatives appear to be the most religious in their "holy war against the Left"
Lever founder David Sirota shares some exciting news about the future of Lever podcasts.
Seventy-nine years ago today, on February 22, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl — members of the resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’ — were killed by the Nazis. Courage is not anything very common, and the value we put on it is a witness to its rarity. Courage is the capability to confront fear, as when […]
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