Big Finish's Doctor Who - Once and Future: "Two's Company" sees Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor stepping into the spotlight for the next chapter.
Reading
by Gary Gardner
Media coverage of the loss of the Titan submersible last week turned the world’s attention to the oceans—that vast, mysterious realm that sits below the surface of our landlocked consciousness. Two factoids in the coverage caught my attention.
The first, emerging from chatter about the extent of the search effort, is that international law requires vessels to respond to an at-sea distress call if they are able to,
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The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the interests of Protestant Ulster. Under the auspices of the Ulster Covenant of 1912 – a document signed by quarter of a million people determined to use any means necessary to prevent Irish Home Rule – unionists drilled and acquired munitions.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 14 (Friday 30 June 2023)
small and thready smells mousyunhearthed, derelict, crawled into the huskof his unself like a chrysalishis pin-heart...
Christian evangelicals in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the leakier the vessel, the greater the god.
Austen’s sparing use of attributions is also a sign of her confidence in her art. She dispensed with unnecessary scaffolding.
We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention.
What are the consequences for politics if the supposed grown-ups are outside the room? For Osborne, Balls, Stewart and Campbell, it means power without responsibility, armchair politics with advertising revenue, status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions.
The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick up a paintbrush. In Richard Meyer’s account, however, Hirshfield was a canny operator who knew how to play on distinctions between high and low culture.
At a time of belated handwringing by liberal Zionists, Golda Meir is being rehabilitated as a progressive icon. But this is based on a misreading of history. Her Zionism and commitment to Jewish dominance helped pave the way for the current wave of settler ethnonationalists.
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine he’s still claiming to be in limbo as a character: ‘I do not believe I have an essential self.’ But he understands what he sees, and his cartographic analysis (and, despite himself, his self-analysis) is incisive.
The suggestion, I think, is that life as we live it may be largely an affair of props and sets, and Wes Anderson is inviting us not to feel too bad about this possibility. The question ‘Who framed Asteroid City?’ looks towards the same answer as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We did, with some prompts from the directors.
The first two decades of the USSR saw what was then the fastest and largest instance of urban growth in human history. In just thirteen years, the population living in cities and towns more than doubled from 26 million to 56 million. Modernisation was achieved at a tremendous human cost, with gruelling constraints imposed on the bulk of the population, even as it opened up new horizons.
Three hundred characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep elaborate notes – perhaps sketching out, as I did, a web of relations on a very large sheet of paper?
At the height of the war two women sat talking at the kitchen table, one tall one short and each reporting back on what they’d last heard from their husbands, those men now said to be dead...
The question that motivates Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel is simple, but hard to answer. What prompted these white, Middle England Christians to leave their homes and families to join a church, the central beliefs of which are so obviously, manifestly, bonkers?
At trials for crimes against humanity, some of the most eloquent testimony comes not from survivors but from skeletons: a bullet hole, or the marks left by a sharp weapon, may be all it takes for defendants’ claims to unravel. But before they can be presented as evidence, the bones must be exhumed, brushed, washed, catalogued and articulated – assembled into a skeleton. Only then can they provide their testimony.
For the past 25 years, Kamila Shamsie has been working on a vast scale. There's a thrill that comes with the grand sweep, the comparison between Western imperialist projects, but Shamsie writes best about Karachi, where she grew up.
Despite evidence showing that only the top 10 per cent of earners received above-inflation pay rises last year, Rishi Sunak has threatened to squeeze public sector wages further in an effort to combat inflation. This is the talk of a technocrat who learned economics from outdated textbooks, not a man fighting for his political life.
Missionaries in Jamaica had campaigned for emancipation and were loathed by the planters, who blamed them for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this historical moment when abolitionists defeated pro-slavers? How did it relate to the long history of violence between the two islands?
Damaged, unfinished or fragmented works have an appeal of their own (Renaissance artists sometimes deliberately sought this ‘non finito’) and are also prized for what they can teach us about an artist’s working methods.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 14 (Friday 30 June 2023)
“There must be some kind of way out of here…” As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.” While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had... Read more
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