LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Richard Vinen on the General Strike * George Prochnik on Chaim Soutine * Michele Pridmore-Brown on the fertility industry * Peter Davidson on John Aubrey * Joan Smith on Gisèle Pelicot * Piers Brendon on Kathleen Harriman * Jonathan Keates on the Venetian Ghetto * Erik Linstrum on Asante gold * Zoe Guttenplan on road signs * Holly E J Black on illustration * Michael Burleigh on the Arctic * Frances Cairncross on corporate scandals * Andrew Seaton on wind power

Not Funny, Not Forgotten

The historian A J P Taylor was at Oxford during the general strike of 1926. After it, he later recalled, relations between the minority of undergraduates, such as himself, who had gone to help the strikers and those who had signed on as special constables or volunteer strike-breakers were cordial. Only those sensible men who had stuck to their books and essays were disdained. The whole episode seemed funny in a stereotypically English way – like a Punch cartoon brought to life.

Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art

By Celeste Marcus

The artist Chaim Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed and headless ox. After managing at the age of twenty, in 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in present-day Belarus, to Paris, Soutine made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s, he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a voluminous impasto, churning with deep, febrile … 

Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity – and the Hidden Costs for Women

By Alev Scott

Fuelled by desire and desperation, and considerable hucksterism, the global fertility industry is sometimes seen as having kinship with the sex trade. Its critics are keen to point out that it’s saturated with eugenicist values and geographic exploitation. In a not atypical scenario, a handful of ‘white eggs’ are purchased … 

John Aubrey at four hundred

Whenever I approach the blind corner on the path south of my house in Oxford, I ring my clear-toned bicycle bell and think of John Aubrey, who noted in the 17th century that church bells sound clearer after rain (which was true for my little bell today). I have often also passed on to tense students approaching their final exams Aubrey’s excellent advice that you are ‘more apt to study’ if you’ve played a gentle game of real tennis (or some less real modern equivalent). And whenever I find…