The Weimar Republic was a ‘great crossroads of modernism’, where cultural innovators from many countries mingled, experimented and lived in defiance of convention. All this was destroyed when the Nazis came to power in 1933, in an orgy of murderous violence against their opponents.
Reading
At the heart of Brian Cummings’s Bibliophobia is a sense of the book as a ‘liminal object’, by which Cummings means that the book is both vessel and object, something that carries and something that is: ‘a transaction between physical and mental universes’.
The urge to register one’s presence, even if only with a pseudonym, is a powerful factor in the history of graffiti. It is found when some forbidden or previously inaccessible territory is being explored.
Buchi Emecheta said that all her books were about survival, but survival doesn’t always mean gritting your teeth. Sometimes it means acting the tourist for a day, skipping the royal press conference for a Vespa ride through Rome, leaving your kids a note saying you’re joining the circus.
You step inside the bathroom and shut the door.
You lock the door.
Get a good look at yourself in the dim lighting. You look great. Remember this because you’re about to look more vulnerable than a baby antelope at the watering hole during lion lunch hour.
Unsnap (they’re always snaps) the top two snaps. Then, resnap them.
You go back to the door. Double-check to make sure that it is locked. Jiggle the handle. Shake it.
Once you’re sure it’s locked, unsnap all the snaps and zipper (there’s always a zipper too), and slide your arms out of the sleeves. Unpeel yourself, you big, stupid banana.
Look down at your chest: you’re either wearing the bra you’ve had for too long and that you tell people you wash, but you’ve never washed it, because you’re worried it’ll lose some of the comfort it brings you. Or you’re completely naked. There is no in between.
Hold the top of the jumpsuit under the back of your thighs so that it’s not touching the floor (gross) and also not touching the toilet (gross). This will be difficult but necessary.
A crown decayed or unfinished. Disarticulated bricks. An echo.The cannon face the rolling breakers,aiming at the line where sky and sea collude.What do they defend? The wild enclosure,which for...
One thing Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is sure of is that there is no such thing as completion, or a fresh start. Many of its images are variations on the theme of traces, leftovers, the aspects of self or history you can’t quite redeem or get rid of.
Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.
Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug.
The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more. ‘Hollywood’ (if you are prepared to believe that kingdom still exists) doesn’t know how to deliver a pointed universality that can upset us.
‘Make Hungary Great Again’ is an effective summation of Orbánism; many Hungarians would like back the tracts of territory lost with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War.
Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.
China’s sheer size, and the revival of decentralised decision-making since the early post-Mao decades, means that a great deal of economic statecraft occurs at lower levels: provinces, cities, districts, counties, townships and so on.
A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes – broken toys, bank statements, vodka bottles, handwritten notes – float serenely into the jaws of the machines.
Among all the new forms of Conservatism springing up in the run up to the next election, Kruger's New Conservatives appear to be the most religious in their "holy war against the Left"
Lever founder David Sirota shares some exciting news about the future of Lever podcasts.
Seventy-nine years ago today, on February 22, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl — members of the resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’ — were killed by the Nazis. Courage is not anything very common, and the value we put on it is a witness to its rarity. Courage is the capability to confront fear, as when […]
- by Aeon Video
- by Monica Westin
- by Shayla Love
Gaza’s health system was on the brink of collapse long before October 2023. The densely populated coastal enclave, home to more than two million Palestinians, had been under siege by Israel for 16 years, a policy which tightly limited the movement of people, food, fuel, building materials and more in and out. A 2022 briefing […]
It's time for politicians to show leadership and give away some power, writes Compass' Frances Foley
The Government appears keen to limit climate protestors' legal justifications for direct action
Dario Bonciani and Johannes Fischer The UK economy has been hit by significant terms-of-trade shocks, most notably the rise in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These shocks have created substantial and persistent inflationary pressure in many countries. Such upheavals bring increased uncertainty about the future, making macroeconomic forecasting more challenging. In this … Continue reading Forecasting UK inflation in the presence of large global shocks
A new report by digital campaigners, Open Rights Group, has found that the data of people who are referred to the Prevent programme is being widely shared, and that data is being retained for years even when referrals are marked ‘no further action’. Thousands of Prevent referrals are made each year ostensibly to “support people […]