Among those detained were a German prince, a former far-right member of Parliament, an active soldier and former members of the police and elite special forces.
Raphael Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, secured a full six-year term and a spot among Democrats’ rising stars.
The justices are considering whether to adopt the “independent state legislature” theory, which could give state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections.
Beijing’s costly policy of lockdowns has pummeled the world’s second-largest economy and set off mass public protests that were a rare challenge to China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
Prosecutors did not indict the former president, but they invoked him throughout the monthlong trial. The Trump Organization had been his springboard to fame and power.
In the final battle of the 2022 midterms, Senator Raphael Warnock dealt another blow to Donald Trump, whose handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker, was outspent and outmatched.
Speaking before a formal decision had been made, Representative Bennie Thompson said his panel had not yet agreed on who would be the subject of the referrals or what the charges would be.
The Art Newspaper (December 6, 2022) – The books team at The Art Newspaper has waded through the piles of art tomes published this year so you don’t have too. Below, each editor has picked three publications that shone through in 2022.
A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France 1760-1830 by Paris A. Spies-Gans (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale)
The miniaturist Sarah Biffen (subject of the excellent Without Hands show at Philip Mould gallery in London, until 12 December, and accompanying publication), born with no arms or legs, was one of many professional women artists to exhibit in major venues in Paris and London between 1760 and 1830, beyond the few currently celebrated (Angelica Kauffman, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, etc.), as Spies-Gans’s exhaustive, groundbreaking research reveals in this beautifully produced book.
Käthe Kollwitz: A Survey of Her Works 1888-1942, edited by Hannelore Fischer (Hirmer/Käthe Kollwitz Museum)
This year has been a particularly good one for stand-alone publishing on historic and Modern women artists, and women’s significant influence within the international art world—fingers crossed this signals a shift (at last) from niche to mainstream. Honourable mention goes to Lund Humphries’s Illuminating Women Artists series, with two books in the bag (Luisa Roldán and Artemisia Gentileschi) and two more scheduled for 2023 (Elisabetta Sirani and Rosalba Carriera). It was a brutal selection process, but the first of my top three, from the many excellent books we reviewed over the last year, is Fischer’s Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz’s brilliance requires no introduction, but this exquisitely illustrated survey, while exploring her many iconic works, draws attention to lesser-known imagery including her subtly erotic subjects.
Jo van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman Who Made Vincent Famous by Hans Luijten, translated by Lynne Richards (Bloomsbury)
Chicago University Press’s first English translation of the Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill’s 1933 memoir was pipped to the post by this superb biography of the equally extraordinary Jo van Gogh-Bonger. So much has been written on Vincent van Gogh that you wonder what more can be said. It turns out much more on the woman who was the early driving force behind the Dutch artist’s legacy.
Gareth Harris, book club co-editor and chief contributing editor
Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth About the Past by Robert Bevan (Verso)
More and more commentators are making their voices heard in the clamour around today’s so-called “culture wars”, outlining the ideologies behind the destruction of, for instance, historic statues. Bevan astutely argues that those who manipulate our cultural past are shaping our future, making the case that historic buildings have become battlegrounds for right-wing and nationalist political arguments. Interestingly, he also questions the authority of Unesco. In one of many polemics, he says: “At the same time as its role in protecting culture has become suffocated by national interests, Unesco now appears to operate on the premise that any wartime damage should be undone.”
The Value of Art by Michael Findlay (Prestel)
This updated version of The Value of Art, first published in 2012, features important new material, focusing on, for instance, the rise of NFTs. Findlay asks, “where are the NFT art critics?… there is little discourse on the relative aesthetic qualities of the images themselves”. He also has strong opinions on “protest art”, saying: “In very broad terms, artists represent the protesting class while collectors represent the museum trustee class, and while the cultural ecosystem needs both, on issues of social justice they are often on different sides of the barricades.”
The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art by Gregory Sholette (Lund Humphries)
As a key member of the activist group Gulf Labor Coalition, Gregory Sholette has a unique perspective. Sholette examines this fascinating subject “from the perspective of an artist and activist who has been active in the field since the 1980s,” writes the art historian Marcus Verhagen in the introduction. This informed analysis spans more than 60 years of art activism, from the Situationist International group of social revolutionaries (1957-72), which directly engaged with the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968, to Black Lives Matter today, which has “unquestionably set a new high bar for protest aesthetics”, Sholette says.
José da Silva, book club co-editor and exhibitions editor
Stop Tanks With Books by Mark Neville (Nazraeli Press)
Neville’s photobook of Ukrainian life before Russia’s invasion in February is both a call to arms—the photographer sent 750 free copies to influential people who might “have it in their power to help Ukraine”—and a stark reminder that Ukraine was already at war in its east, as depicted in the photographs of soldiers manning trenches and checkpoints. However, it is the tender portraits of everyday life—people at the beach, in school, at a rave, eating ice cream—that really bring home the tragedy that has unfolded in Ukraine.
The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem by Julie Phillips (W. W. Norton & Company)
While most of the case studies in this book are from the literary world, the opening section on Alice Neel is a searing account of the complexities of balancing (or not) being a mother and an artist—and the often heavy price women pay. Neel, for example, can sometimes come across as brutal and uncaring, but these labels would rarely be used to describe an artist father in the same situation. Neel said that for much of her life she felt she “didn’t have the right to paint because I had two sons”. The book explores the difficult issues around the subject with no judgment and or neat conclusions—and is all the richer for it.
Raphael by David Ekserdjian, Tom Henry et al. (National Gallery Global Ltd)
If you missed the standout Raphael show at London’s National Gallery earlier this year, its catalogue is the next best thing. The rich imagery and texts make it the perfect coffee table book for art history buffs to dip into over the holiday season. There are also tasty titbits to tell the family over Christmas lunch, such as the belief that the Vatican’s foundations began cracking at news of Raphael’s death. Or when Munich’s Alte Pinakothek sold Raphael’s masterpiece Bindo Altoviti because it was believed at the time to have been painted by his assistant Giulio Romano, to buy what turned out to be a discredited Matthias Grünewald…
Launching drones at air bases 300 miles from its own territory, Ukraine changed the geography of the war. It said it had developed drones with a range of over 600 miles.
These misty and damp parts of the country have long beckoned to mushroom hunters with the promise of plenty, but now peril, too, lies beneath the earth’s surface.
The justices are expected to settle a question left open in 2018: how to reconcile claims of religious liberty with laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.
These misty and damp parts of the country have long beckoned to mushroom hunters with the promise of plenty, but now peril, too, lies beneath the earth’s surface.
The move, which the government did not confirm, might be a concession to the protest movement that erupted after the death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police.
A Colorado graphic designer says she has a First Amendment right to refuse to create websites for same-sex weddings despite a state anti-discrimination law.
No one knew what to do with a lost Russian pilot who suddenly appeared in the occupied city of Kherson. The case has revealed the blurred line between pragmatism in a war zone and collaboration with the enemy.
The United States saw its weaknesses exploited in a 3-1 loss to the Netherlands. But after a solid showing and with a young team brimming with promise, the best may be yet to come.
The world’s harshest Covid restrictions exemplify how Xi Jinping’s authoritarian excesses have rewritten Beijing’s longstanding social contract with its people.
Given the relentlessly grim nature of the news this year, it’s hardly surprising that escapism in the form of cosy crime continues to challenge traditional crime/thriller bestsellers, with Richard Osman’s third Thursday Murder Club mystery, The Bullet That Missed (Viking), riding high in the charts. The last 12 months have seen a bumper crop of excellent books at the cosy end of the spectrum, from Ajay Chowdhury’s second crime novel, The Cook (Harvill Secker), set against the backdrop of an east London curry house, to veteran Canadian author Louise Penny’s 18th Armand Gamache novel,A World of Curiosities(Hodder & Stoughton).
Inventiveness appears to be on the rise, too. Janice Hallett’s second novel, The Twyford Code (Viper), told in transcribed audio files retrieved from an iPhone, succeeds in being fiendishly clever and very moving. Authors such as Gillian McAllister, whose Wrong Place Wrong Time (Michael Joseph) is an ingeniously plotted murder mystery in which time travels backwards, and Gabino Iglesias, whose high-octane southern noir thriller The Devil Takes You Home (Wildfire) has supernatural elements, are also giving the genre a welcome shot in the arm. Others have approached familiar tropes from new angles: the main character in CS Robertson’s The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill (Hodder & Stoughton) is not a cop but a “death cleaner”.
Recent revelations have meant that the British public’s growing distrust of the police is very much a part of the UK’s permacrisis. Ian Rankin, creator of maverick cop John Rebus, commented recently that there are “big questions” for authors who write police procedurals. “In the current state of the world, how can you write about a police officer and make them the goody, when we look around us and see that so often the police are not the goodies?” In his latest Rebus novel, the splendid A Heart Full of Headstones (Orion), an officer who has been charged with domestic violence tries to make a deal by stitching up dodgy colleagues.
The year has been punctuated by the collective groans of crime fiction critics as the results of yet another male celebrity’s lockdown diversion landed on their doormats (presumably the female celebrities were too busy home schooling). The most impressive of these is Frankie Boyle’sMeantime(John Murray): set in Glasgow during the aftermath of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, it’s both funny and moving.
There have been plenty of excellent non-celebrity debuts. Standouts include Patrick Worrall’s complex spy thriller The Partisan (Transworld); Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain (Transworld), a paranoid and unsettling tale of masculinity in crisis; and Wake (Hodder & Stoughton), Australian newcomer Shelley Burr’s sensitive exploration of the aftermath of trauma in a parched outback town. Katie Gutierrez’s More Than You’ll Ever Know (Michael Joseph) is an intelligent and nuanced examination of the complicated relationship between a true-crime writer and her subject, a female bigamist. And The Maid by Nita Prose (HarperCollins) will have you rooting for its titular heroine, neurodivergent Molly, as she finds herself caught up in a web of deception at the fancy Regency Grand Hotel.
There have been strong additions to other long-running and well-loved police series, such as Give Unto Others (Hutchinson Heinemann), the 31st novel to feature Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti, and The Murder Book (Little, Brown), 18th outing for Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne. More recent additions to the police procedural canon include Elly Griffith’s DI Harbinder Kaur, who had her third outing in Bleeding Heart Yard(Quercus), and Alan Parks’s shambolic, mid-70s Glaswegian detective Harry McCoy, who had his fifth in May God Forgive (Canongate). Maror by Lavie Tidhar (Apollo), an epic, multi-generational thriller set in Israel, with an enigmatic cop at its centre, is also well worth the read.
Highlights in historical crime include Blue Water (Viper) by Leonora Nattrass, a shipboard thriller set in 1794, and The Lost Man of Bombay (Hodder & Stoughton), the third in Vaseem Khan’s excellent series set in post-partition India. Alternative history has been well served by the thoroughly chilling Queen High (Quercus), CJ Carey’s sequel to last year’s superb Widowland, which imagines a postwar Britain under Nazi rule.
Although translated crime fiction seems thinner on the ground at the moment, the quality is high: standouts include Olivier Norek’s impressive policier Breaking Point (MacLehose, translated from French by Nick Caister) and Antti Tuomainen’s delightfully funny The Moose Paradox (Orenda, translated from Finnish by David Hackston). All in all, the genre seems in good shape: a broader church, less formulaic and more exciting.
President Emmanuel Macron, dealing with a difficult start to his second term, can return to France feeling buoyed by a warm reception and unity on Ukraine.
The affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard seemed to confirm advice given for years to Asian Americans: Don’t play chess, don’t check the box declaring race.
Showing a united front during a state visit, President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France affirmed their support for Ukraine ahead of a cold winter that will test the alliance.
State visits are meant to test how far flattery can get a president in winning the support of a key ally. But President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France have a “genuine” rapport, an official said.
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