LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Who Owns The Arctic?’ by Laleh Khalili; De Kooning in Cuba by T.J. Clark; Politics on Speed by William Davies…

Who owns the Arctic?

Laleh Khalili

From the 16th century onwards, as European powers feverishly colonised the world, the possibility of a Northern Sea Route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Scandinavia to the Bering Strait, tantalised the Dutch and the British as an alternative to the southern routes to Asia and the Americas, which were dominated by Portugal and Spain. But the route only became a reality in the Soviet era, after investments in scientific, economic, industrial and military infrastructure in Siberia. 

Politics on Speed

William Davies

This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. 

De Kooning in Cuba

T.J. Clark

De Kooning’s Suburb in Havana is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants to show us how hard it had to work to get precisely nowhere. Why nowhere was where it wished to get to is a question it leaves to the viewer. 

Orbán’s Fall

Jan-Werner Müller

Can there be poetic justice in politics? Perhaps once in a lifetime. In 1989, a young Viktor Orbán bravely told the crowds in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square that it was time for the Russians to go home, just as protesters had demanded in 1956; almost four decades later, he was heckled on the campaign trail with the same words.