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…
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The many faces of Shakespeare’….
China, America and the danger of war By Philip Zelikow
Discovering exactly what Shakespeare owned By Lucy Munro
Blake Morrison’s guide to life writing By Joyce Carol Oates
Writing about others as a means to write about yourself By Catherine Taylor
We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.
George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.
George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries edited by Geoff Wisner
In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City, January 28–May 24, 2026
Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.
Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy by Teresa Ghilarducci, with a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.
An argument for ‘British is best’
The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.
The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd
What smartphones can’t record
Modern English translations that do justice to the work
The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …
Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..
In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.
In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou
A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.
By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire by Mélanie Lamotte
There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.
Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell
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