THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features ‘Political philosophy? by Harvey Mansfield; A dream of reason by Bartle Bull; The elephant in the room by Anthony Daniels; Kierkegaard & the age by Jacob Howland; New poems by Morri Creech, Kaily Dorfman, Matthew Stewart & John Poch….
“The Clearance of Aoineadh Mòr, 1824” by Tarn MacArthur: A historical account of the Highland Clearances, specifically focusing on the displacement of communities in Scotland.
At the Movies: Michael Wood provides his regular column of film criticism, likely focusing on current European or art-house releases.
Poetry & Correspondence: The issue also contains poems and a robust letters section, which in this period has been heavily occupied by debates over the Arctic (following Laleh Khalili’s piece in the previous issue) and the fallout of the UK local elections.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Among Putin’s Russians’…
The ideology behind Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union By Richard J. Evans
Previously unseen letters between Ezra Pound and Gladys Hynes By Ed Vulliamy
The rise, fall and survival of open-air swimming pools By David Horspool
Video games and political violence By Regina Rini
Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valley’s young founders rebelled against—and, in so rebelling, became.
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates
The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.
In Everthing Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde’s attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.
Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J. Hoberman
Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.
Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster
The small town of Weimar is overladen with historical associations. Goethe spent more than fifty years there as an employee and friend of Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August. After the last grand duke abdicated in November 1918, the National Assembly met in Weimar to draw up a new republican constitution for Germany. Other symbolically charged venues considered were Nuremberg (home of Dürer) and Bayreuth (because of Wagner), but it was Weimar that gave its name to the period of German history from …
Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911. She preferred the idea that her namesake was Louise Michel, ‘the red virgin of Montmartre’, an anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune. It wasn’t true, of course, but …
A phrase like ‘fortress England’ seems to echo down the centuries, and turns up again in This Little World, Nandini Das’s new study of identity and belonging, cross-border migration, assimilation and estrangement in the period between 1500 and the restoration of Charles II. Das seeks to unmask the period’s most fundamental assumptions about English … read more
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A View of Her Own’….
Tracey Emin’s self-fashioning By Sophie Oliver
Women landscape painters reconsidered By Jenny Uglow
Mankind has escaped nuclear war, for now By P. D. Smith
Mexico’s challenge to received historical ideas By Benjamin T. Smith
The bittersweet contentment of old age By Rory Waterman
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.
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’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.
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.
In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality. By Fintan O’Toole
The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.
On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S.Q. Visser
Seamus Heaney’s complete poems, following on editions of his letters, prose, and translations, confirm the extent of his achievement.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue, with Matthew Hollis
An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.
Manet and Morisot – an exhibition at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 29–July 5, 2026
THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features ‘ Western Decline’ by Victor Davis Hanson; Stoppard & Stopparianism by Jonathan Gaisman; The hector’s veto by Simon Heffer; The metaphysics of murder by Theodore Dalrypmple and New poems by Alfred Corn, Michael Homolka and Sunil Iyengar…
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