
Inside the November 6, 2022 Issue:

Inside the November 6, 2022 Issue:

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly trueportrait of Britain told through four generations of one family
In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it’s the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She’ll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.
This week: uproar over the National Gallery in London’s building plans—is it a sensitive makeover or like “an airport lounge”?
We talk to the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, about the gallery’s controversial plans for changes to its Sainsbury Wing, and to Rowan Moore, architecture critic at the Observer, about his views on the designs by the architect Annabel Selldorf, and how they respond to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s original Post-Modern building.
Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, the director of Art X Lagos, tells us about the contemporary art scene in Nigeria’s most populous city, and how the fair is addressing the climate emergency, as devastating floods wreak havoc in West Africa. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Marc Chagall’s The Falling Angel (1923/1933/1947), the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany.Art X Lagos, Federal Palace, Lagos, Nigeria, 5-6 NovemberChagall: World in Turmoil, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, until 19 February 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Met – Join the exhibition’s curators Emily Braun and Elizabeth Cowling for a virtual tour of Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, which offers a radically new view of Cubism by demonstrating its engagement with the age-old tradition of trompe l’oeil painting.
A self-referential art concerned with the nature of representation, trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) beguiles the viewer with perceptual and psychological games that complicate definitions of truth and fiction. Along with Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages, the exhibition presents canonical examples of European and American trompe l’oeil painting from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Art in America – The history of the Southwest is long and vexed. Many think of America as developing from east to west, from the original 13 colonies to settlements made in the name of Manifest Destiny. But the West in all its richness was there, of course, long before it was “discovered” by venturers from elsewhere. The region has been home to a palimpsest of cultures, but the gruesome theft of land from Indigenous people remains a defining trauma. The southernmost parts of the Southwest at one time belonged to Mexico; today that area is embroiled in battles over immigration, and scarred by a former president’s xenophobic desire to build a wall. Plagued by drought, the entire Southwest tolls the ominous bell of climate change.
GOD’S-EYE VIEWS
by Jackson Arn
Aerial photography captures the Southwest’s natural splendor, explosive urban development, and military secrets.
This week’s @TheTLS , featuring André Aciman on Proust; Margaret Drabble on Robert Aickman; @LucyHH on Naples; @AnnPettifor on climate refugees; @scheffer_pablo on Nona Fernández; @IsabelleBaafi on the poetry of June Jordan, Wanda Coleman and Rita Dove – and more.
It is now forty years since Melina Mercouri, the Greek Minister for Culture from 1981 to 1989, famous also as a film star and singer, addressed UNESCO’s World Conference on Cultural Policies to draw international attention to the campaign with which she would be identified until her death in 1994, the repatriation to Athens of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. ‘We are not asking for the return of a painting or a statue’, she said: ‘We are asking for the return of a portion of a unique monument, the privileged symbol of a whole culture’.
As images, ancient Roman wall paintings command attention for their bold compositions, vibrant and saturated colours, convincing naturalism and the fantastical mythologies they depict. As objects they also captivate for the dramatic circumstances surrounding their near- destruction, the miracle (or rarity) of their survival and the alchemical nature of lime plaster and pigment.
Inside the Literary Review – November 2022:
London: The Great Transformation 1860–1920
The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History
Was Lockdown Lawful? – Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why It Matters
Damned Statistics – Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers
PHOTO: HARPER
By Lionel Shriver | Harper
With a restless imagination and an instinct to take on progressive orthodoxies, the novelist and essayist Lionel Shriver brings her “smart, plain-spoken and unpredictable” style to subjects that many writers prefer to shy away from. Review by Meghan Cox Gurdon.
PHOTO: LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Edited by Gary W. Gallagher | Library of America
In a trilogy of narratives that “broke the mold” in Civil War history, Bruce Catton told the story of the Eastern theater with an eye to the sacrifices and sufferings of the ordinary soldiers who fought and died on both sides. Review by Harold Holzer.
PHOTO: HARPER
By Jonathan Freedland | Harper
Walter Rosenberg did not make it easy for the Nazi-allied regime in his native Slovakia to deport him—along with thousands of other Slovak Jews—to extermination camps like Auschwitz. But once he wound up there, he was determined to get out and spread the word of the ongoing genocide. Review by Diane Cole.
PHOTO: KNOPF
By Paul Newman | Knopf
A long-awaited, posthumously published memoir from the star of “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” and other classics reveals the inner world of a hard-working actor who “breathed in insecurity and exhaled doubt.” Review by Michael O’Donnell.
PHOTO: DOUBLEDAY
By Tyler Kepner | Doubleday
What was for many years the center of the American sports calendar has lost some of its grip on the collective imagination. But a journey through October Classics past proves that the magic of the World Series still has a potent charm. Review by David M. Shribman.
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PHOTO: KNOPF
By Neil Baldwin | Knopf
The pioneering figure of modern dance was a daring innovator, a technical perfectionist and a preternaturally gifted performer. While she transformed the way a generation of dancers thought about movement, she looked for ways to claim her art firmly as an American one. Review by Hamilton Cain.
PHOTO: ABRAMS PRESS
By Steve Hendricks | Abrams Press
Fasting has a long history of use as a spiritual aid—a ritual of purification and turning away from indulgence—and as a tool for protest. But emerging science suggests that its positive effects on physical health can no longer be overlooked. Review by Matthew Rees.
PHOTO: LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Edited by Jonathan R. Eller | Library of America
Ray Bradbury’s unique science fiction owed more to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s darkly symbolic stories than to H.G. Wells’s rationalist visions. On a Mars that held curious correspondences to the Midwestern country of Bradbury’s youth, fathers and sons negotiated the strange spaces between them. Review by Brad Leithauser.
PHOTO: LITTLE, BROWN
By Stacy Schiff | Little, Brown
The “stage manager” of the American Revolution has resisted attempts by historians to pin down the details of his life. Stacy Schiff finds a potential key to Samuel Adams’s enigmatic character in the financial tumult of his family’s business. Review by Mark G. Spencer.
PHOTO: PANTHEON
By Joseph Sassoon | Pantheon
The business empire of the Sassoon dynasty began in Bombay, where the family of Iraqi Jews had fled to escape persecution, and flourished in the opium trade with China. The “Rothschilds of Asia” kept a low profile—and when the tides of fortune turned against them, their once-global enterprise became a distant memory. Review by Norman Lebrecht.

Inside the The New Yorker Magazine, November 7, 2022:
In the state’s midterms—which could determine the balance of the Senate and the integrity of the Presidential race in 2024—Democrats are fighting for the vote. Republicans are fighting to undermine it.
As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered?
The concept helps entertainment companies like Marvel Studios recycle old characters—but it can also unlock new kinds of storytelling.