London Review of Books, June 9, 2022 –
The new issue is now online, featuring Jonathan Meades’s #platinumjubilee tribute,
@mmschwartz on the Bataclan trial,
@MJCarter10 on Desert Island Discs, Colin Burrow on Stanley Cavell, Jo Applin on Judy Chicago and a cover by Naomi Frears: http://lrb.co.uk
Things don’t usually fall apart completely in Britain and the centre holds. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, civil war raged across the islands. Military rule in England was followed by the conquest of Ireland and Scotland, paving the way for the Union. Michael Braddick, reviewing Ian Gentles’s The New Model Army, thinks there are lessons here for our “dysfunctional” democracy. This week the TLS features several meditations on times of civil war.
By Martin Ivens
Eric Drooker’s “Uvalde, May 24, 2022” – Gun violence and the American way of life.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by Eric Drooker
Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 2022 – @TheTLS, featuring @NshShulman on the Queen; @nclarke14 on Melvyn Bragg; @richardlea on nuclear power; Claire Lowdon on Elif Batuman; @RohanMaitzen on Rosalind Brackenbury; @rinireg on abortion – and more.
London Review of Books, May 26, 2022 –
LettersHugh Pennington, Anna Swan, Thomas Ciantra, Nicholas Blanton, David Howell, Oren Margolis, Peter Thonemann, Michael Gray, Nick Rampley, Bernard Richards, Tom WellsClare JacksonElizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts by Nadine AkkermanJames ButlerShort Cuts: Limping to Success
Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 2022 – This week’s @TheTLS, featuring @wmarybeard on Roman souvenirs; @EdwardDocx on Boris Johnson and contempt; @pwilcken on Operation Car Wash; @AdamSJFoulds on music and conflict; @_Poots_ on Leslie Thomas QC – and more
Booklist Magazine, May 15, 2022 – From a barrier-leaping African American woman in the Gilded Age to a military coup in Guatemala and the woman bookseller who first published James Joyce’s Ulysses a century ago, the most radiant historical novels of the past 12 months illuminate many lives and times.
Will COVID controls keep controlling us?
In January 2022 I came down with mild symptoms of something or other. I was already triple-vaxxed, with a French vaccine passport (“pass vaccinal”) on my iPhone to prove it, and like a true pioneer I had already suffered through a bout of COVID-19 long before, in March 2020.
By Françoise Mouly, Art by Ana Juan, May 16, 2022
It is thought that cats lived alongside people for thousands of years, hunting the rodents that inevitably accompany human settlements, before they deigned to become domesticated—a state that many cat owners can attest feels provisional to this day. One research paper on the history of the house cat observes, “Let us just say that our cats do not take instruction well. Such attributes suggest that whereas other domesticates were recruited from the wild by humans who bred them for specific tasks, ancestors of domestic cats most likely chose to live among humans because of opportunities they found for themselves.”
Boomers Daily 