Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 12 (Friday 02 June 2023)
Reading
InheritanceI am of Tullamore, the sonOf a gombeen man, so I knowThe use of a good solicitor,The value of nothing said,The price of love lostOr gained. To which we addThe cost of modern...
‘Thirty years had passed since I last interviewed Sharon Henderson. In 1992 I was sent to her flat on the Wear Garth estate in Sunderland after her seven-year-old daughter, Nikki, was murdered. The following year I covered the trial of George Heron, whose confessions were ruled inadmissible on the grounds that the police interviews had been ‘oppressive’. And then, one day last year, I stumbled on this paragraph: ‘David Boyd, 54, of Chesterton Court, Stockton, Teesside, has been charged with the murder of Nikki Allan.’ And I knew I was going back to Wearside.
As Mia Hansen-Løve’s style and interests suggest, any narrative solution is one option among several. That is the force of the other meaning of the film’s title: not hoping against hope, or believing in luck, but living through the long morning of what we don’t know about ourselves.
Children in Tudor England did much the same things that children do now. They jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’.
You cannot help being struck by the awesome stability of all the Bank of England’s arrangements: the paper for banknotes was manufactured at Portals’ mills in Hampshire from 1724 until the switch to polymer notes less than a decade ago. All the bills and dividends were painstakingly made out by hand in pretty much the same fashion until the advent of computers.
Because the USSR had no military presence in Africa, it relied on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War on the cheap. (The CIA-funded American Society of African Culture, by contrast, was known as ‘Uncle Moneybags’.)
The idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through work or taxation. In Lotto Britain, the Good Life is the life they have on Love Island, an endless parade of self-tanning and nail extensions, gym sessions and Prosecco.
Peatlands are wetlands, the argument goes, and wetlands disturb us; they’re the abject backwaters of modernity – marginal and malarial, disavowed and despoiled. We’ve ruined them and now they’ll ruin us right back.
Could pottery be art? Should a teapot pour? Lucie Rie had no truck with this. When asked about theoretical or critical questions she would answer with crisp finality: ‘I make pots. It is my profession.’
Most of the labourers have travelled from elsewhere, leaving behind their families. This is their second or third career. ‘I’m still a fisherman,’ a mechanic foreman from Newfoundland tells Katie, Kate Beaton’s avatar. ‘I’m just here.’
This is not a novel full of euphemism or implication. K Patrick has said they set out to write a ‘horny’ novel and this is what we have here – one composed of short, fragmentary (and at times disorienting) sentences.
release as holding cellcoffee mornings with other mums from schoolas holding cellimagine a...
The story of Macmillan’s marketing and its advertising of a ‘GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES’ of volumes is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in 19th-century Britain, aligning with Matthew Arnold’s sense that poetry was coming to replace religion.
University workers are fighting for job security and fair pay. But docking lecturers’ pay risks worsening industrial action, UCU activist Dr Antonia Dawes writes
A party crackdown on local party cooperation is preventing Labour councillors from leveraging their election victories to unseat the Tories in some towns, Josiah Mortimer reports
Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring counteroffensive. In a recent column reported from the Ukrainian capital — headline: “I was just in Kyiv under fire” — Boot writes that actual signs of war there are few. Something akin to normalcy prevails and the mood is remarkably upbeat. With the front “only [his word!] about 360 miles away,” Kyiv is a “bustling, vibrant metropolis with traffic jams and crowded bars... Read more
Alan Macleod reveals the new unconventional recruitment strategy being deployed by the US military: using psyop specialists disguised as E-girls to combat dismal recruitment numbers among a war-weary Generation Z.
The post From Simp to Soldier: How the Military is Using E-Girls To Recruit Gen Z Into Service appeared first on MintPress News.
A collection of hysterical whiners The through line is dominance, dominance by those who believe in their bones in their right (or their tribe’s) to sit atop the human pecking order. All their invocations of freedom? It’s their freedom to set the boundaries of what others may do, say, and believe. And when they sense their control being challenged (even if it’s a mirage), hoo-boy, they turn peevish enough to tan their testicles, storm the Capitol, and disrupt school board meetings. One sees it in the conservative need to turn the screws on the unfortunate. Are there no workhouses? Bring back the treadmill. Far-right Republicans in the House grind their teeth “that the work requirements they wanted to impose on food stamp recipients are less cruel than they’d hoped,” writes Greg Sargent.
Dear Breasts,
First off: I see you. I want you to know that. You have tirelessly nourished two demanding infants over countless hours of your existence. They’ve slapped you. They’ve scratched you. They’ve wasted your elixir by popping off at the slightest distraction, just as you were pouring your whole being into the effort. And have they ever taken one moment to say thank you? To say, “O source of my ginormous, thrice-rolled thighs, I appreciate you?” Of course not. They’ve taken you for granted. I can’t imagine what a letdown that must be. (No pun intended).
I hear you when you say you want a raise. I do acknowledge the hours of unexpected overtime you have worked: overnight shifts, sometimes two or three a night. Deeply admirable. I acknowledge your sacrifice, not just of your time, but also what years of hard labor have done to you. You say you are stretched and wasted—not to mention, that you stretch nearly to my waist. I hear you, I really do. No one questions your dedication.
However. I am afraid I must decline your request.
Coventry was once known as the Midlands Motor City. Home to Daimler, the UK’s first car maker and later Jaguar, the city thrived in post-war Britain. But the boom wasn’t to last. From the 1970s, car production significantly declined and unemployment rose. Today, Coventry’s great motoring marques are no more. The closure of the Jaguar […]
Consultant David Oliver explains how Boris Johnson’s lies continue to have a devastating impact on the infrastructure of healthcare in the UK
- by Aeon Video
- by Daniel Tutt