The road to Jerusalem, it has so often been said, runs through Cairo. Writing from a regime prison cell in the months after Palestine’s ‘unity intifada’ of 2021, the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El-Fattah modified this historic injunction: ‘The road to Jerusalem looked like it ran through Cairo — but what is certain is that […]
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Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.
At a time when there was no female equivalent of the gentleman’s club, the Yellow Book offered a congenial literary space in which men and women could joke, flirt and briefly imagine themselves free to exchange their ideas on neutral ground.
In the crisis-ridden 1930s, Hughes was happy to combine the roles of activist, foreign correspondent and purveyor of agitprop verse. His most inventive and original poetry, however, had other sources, and in retrospect the most significant journey that he ever made was one of the shortest, from Times Square, where he spent his first night in New York on 4 September 1921, to 135th Street.
Ultimately, the companies responsible for producing and distributing infected blood products paid more than a billion dollars in compensation worldwide, but most victims never got a penny.
It’s too late in the day, and too late in the genre, for a gangster movie to be anything other than ironic in relation to morality. But then Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is not only a gangster movie, it is also an attempt to record historical, interracial harm.
‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership in Tokyo envisaged by the former US secretary of war Henry Stimson failed to materialise.
Barbara Kingsolver’s reason for following the plot of Dickens’s David Copperfield so closely is simple. In the acknowledgments, she thanks Dickens for ‘his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.’ Demon Copperhead sets out to revive a kind of creative indignation.
How to make a reckoning between the people whose most traumatic moment is the industrial genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and those for whom the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel is where the injustice begins? It is, of course, a false choice.
The brutality of Hamas’s attack shattered Israel’s definition of itself as a post-Holocaust sanctuary that guarantees protection for the Jewish people inside and outside its boundaries. Israel’s response isn’t simply vengeful; it’s existential.
Exceptionalism is the essence of Balmorality. There is no need to break the rules because they have been written in such a way that the private interests of the royal family are secured. Such arrangements are indefensible, unfitting and completely normal.
Mike Johnson is the least experienced member to become speaker in more than a hundred years. His positions – on divorce, non-procreative sex, contraception, dinosaurs – are almost cartoonishly right-wing, and he’s not entirely on board with free and fair elections. ‘Do you know what a democracy is?’ he said in 2019. ‘Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.’
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 22 (Friday 03 November 2023)
(after visiting The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum)For Ange MlinkoWhen did museums devolve to the didacticSpelling out our wonder? Not enoughTo show us something wonderful...
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 22 (Friday 03 November 2023)
In recent years the UK government has become increasingly hostile to Freedom of Information requests on arms, but there is enough publicly available data to be certain that the planes currently flattening apartment blocks and refugee camps in Gaza rely on components engineered and manufactured in Britain.
In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate, even meaningless. Tocqueville refused to accept this anarchic new world at face value.
Rather than complacently celebrating Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, we should be trying to understand why self-declared anti-liberals succeeded in the first place, and in what ways their politics might endure even if they lose at the polls.
Pleasure is supposedly more valuable today than it will be tomorrow; deferral has a cost. But to the canonists, unlike the capitalists, this made no sense. Time wasn’t something that could be bought or sold.
The self-appointed guardian of our streetstands all day in the doorwayof the house opposite,glaring at everyone who passes.His job is making sure the sun never shineson his side of Raleigh...
Alexander Baron was an atheist from a young age, telling his parents that if they insisted on having him bar mitzvahed he would hide a ham sandwich in his pocket and place it on the Torah scrolls during the ceremony. His character’s humour and diction was ‘as much native East End as it is Jewish’. But there are times when, however remote your connection to an identity might seem, the world refuses to let you forget about it.
Advance-fee scams – sometimes called ‘Nigerian prince scams’, although they mostly originate in other countries – have become a hackneyed example of online fraud. But Blay-Miezah and his varyingly complicit associates managed to keep the con going for almost twenty years, extracting hundreds of millions from investors, despite warnings from a number of prominent people, including Henry Kissinger and Shirley Temple.
Neither modern nor ‘postmodern’ quite describes Madelon Vriesendorp’s odd, outlier objects. No manifesto here, they quietly do their own thing, and are all the better for that.
Doctor Who has many fascinating unofficial corners, including this don't-miss Kickstart for The Lost Doctor Annual 2023 with Ken Campbell.
What we are witnessing in the UK and the US is a weaponizing of the situation in Israel and Gaza to justify pre-existing right-wing or left-wing goals