As fake grassroots organisations continue their culture war – we need to fight back, writes Otto English
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Populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the US Capitol. Everything is now political, and society increasingly resembles a ‘permanent Dreyfus Affair’.
In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build a life that is illegible to her.
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right.
Moving the Sanskrit epics ‘from mythology to history’ turns out to mean the obliteration of an archaeological site by a construction site. This is the kind of historical reckoning which India’s present government endorses.
Democracy means sharing space with people whom we find annoying, and who sometimes deliberately annoy us. But like it or not, we have to have the right to get in each other’s faces.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)
There’s no boredom in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and no pulse of adrenaline either. To be in orbit, after all, is to be held in a balance of forces. Any acceleration would nudge things out of kilter.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)
Alasdair MacIntyre drew a conclusion he has stuck to ever since: that philosophy takes time. Instead of choosing an opinion that appeals to you and forsaking all others, you need to take on different arguments and give them time to sort themselves out.
Dear Ambitious Real Estate Agent,
It was the leggings, wasn’t it? I didn’t plan on buying them, but my daughter’s best friend’s mom was hosting a pop-up shopping party, and I found myself powerless to resist those six peppy syllables. All the other moms were telling me they felt like butter, a sensation I had not considered possible or desirable in a pair of pants. Have you ever tried to rinse butter off your fingers?
I was going to pick the least offensive one—solid army green—but this was a “party.” Fuck it. For eighteen dollars, I parted the racks and reached for the most garish pattern. I planned to tone it down with a chunky, oversized black turtleneck sweater and add Doc Martens for a subtle punk vibe.
But I didn’t.
The spacesbetweenthings beganspeaking. So it wasI understood Iwas nowto remainsilent. Saw howwe were allplungedinto this new strengtheningsilence. Was itvision was itcatastrophe. Thisfirst personI...
Israeli tactics have little in common with standard counterinsurgency doctrine or rules of engagement. The war on Gaza is at its core retributive: an act of collective punishment. Like all punishment, to ask whether or not it ‘works’ misses the point that punishment is often an end in itself.
I have spent 25 years working as a criminal defence lawyer and have yet to find anyone who knows of a single police officer being convicted for their role in a wrongful conviction.
The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad, did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.
By the 1950s Scandinavian design principles dominated British architecture schools, and were taken to be the natural model for the new towns, new housing estates and new universities. The frustrated young Brutalist James Stirling, for whom all this was frippery and cowardice, declared: ‘Let’s face it, William Morris was a Swede.’
There’s a voyeuristic quality to so many of the discussions of Anne’s rise and fall, since it was allegedly her sexual allure that made her queen and her sexual licence that led to her death. The compulsion to clothe the bare facts of historical evidence in sumptuous layers of invented emotion frequently brings the descriptions close to caricature.
To write about gay men in Britain in the 19th century should be to write about them as sons, brothers, friends, lovers, husbands, fathers, grandparents, members of a social class, employees, employers, thinkers, readers, politicians, imperialists and so on; as part of the world, not as apart from it.
You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no inspectors, no languages. You couldn’t talk to him on days he was painting clouds, his wife said.
The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic remains. At its best, watching a game of snooker is like watching a kind of exquisitely delayed explosion.
Johnson’s HouseThe hopeless, who hadNowhere else to go, he packedInto his house. SoLoneliness took onThe look of home, duty grewUseful, like tea-cups.TrialsThey go like lightningOver jumps,...
The gruelling, often grotesque nature of the Italian campaign is reason enough to remember it, but it’s been overlooked, idly regarded as filler between the defeat of Rommel and the Normandy Landings.
Popular Conservatism is registered to a company whose director used to be the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs
Details have updated. Make sure to look at the Conference Page for the latest information. The University of Leeds July 15-17, 2024 CALL FOR PAPERS (Submissions Deadline: Friday March 1, …
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The EU and the UK are supporting Ukraine at a crucial juncture in its war against Russia, argues Mark Temnycky.