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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Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens’, as Eric Williams put it. They founded charitable schools, hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading humanitarians of their age’.
The defeat of The Voice leaves Aboriginal culture stuck in the same queasy relationship to the white nation and its essentially European notion of history that it has been in since the early 20th century, when serious efforts to acknowledge Indigenous culture began. The result is a mixture of conservation, invented tradition and misunderstanding.
When Yevonde made the new case for colour in photography, she also made the case for women behind the camera, controlling the views. Who better to advance the art and push colour into a black and white world than those who wore red lipstick and scarlet nail polish?
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 24 (Friday 01 December 2023)
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.
There has been a surge in serious offences committed by police officers, reports Andrew Kersley
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SNL, Elon Musk/Disney, Marvel Zombies, Iger/Zaslav, Doctor Who, The Sandman, Taylor Swift/Joe Rogan & more!
The Lever breaks down how the country’s largest health insurer uses artificial intelligence to deny rehabilitation services for older and disabled Americans.
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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- by Angelos Alfatzis
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dropped the murder charges against Tracy McCarter last year, citing insufficient evidence.
The post NYPD Accused of Fabricating Domestic Violence Survivor’s Murder Confession appeared first on The Intercept.

- by Jakob Hohwy & Kevin Berryman