LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA: The latest issue features…
On the connection between books and home Kyle Wyatt
Does healing the world mean abandoning capitalism? Darrell Varga
Where non-sovereign nations dwell George Anderson
Jackie Robinson’s season in Montreal David Marks Shribman
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Fall Books’…
As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.
Timely questions lurk at the heart of connoisseurship: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect it?
The Connoisseur: A Cultural History by Peter Burke
The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art by Shira Brisman
Among its peers in the Ivy League, Dartmouth was perfectly positioned to resist Trump’s attack on higher education. It chose not to.
In The Diversity of Morals, Steven Lukes attempts to reconcile philosophical arguments that there is one morality despite cultural differences with empirical studies that suggest it’s all relative.
The Diversity of Morals by Steven Lukes
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
By Colin Burrow
What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing a work of literary criticism, as they happily did in the 1970s and 1980s. Even literary biography, literary criticism’s previously marketable stepsister, no longer brings a gleam to a publisher’s eye. The grassroots of the subject are also suffering badly. Since 2000 the number of people taking A-level English literature in England has dropped by around a third, to around 36,000, with an even higher drop among male students.
It’s getting on for twenty-four years ago that I first read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1955). Books tend to come to us when we need them, and it’s easy to see why Tom Ripley’s project of self-reinvention and triumphant class resentment was so appealing to me as a twenty-year-old undergraduate.
Few groups in history have been so variously defined, quarrelled over, misrepresented and appropriated as the Vikings. Their identity elusive, they have been passed around like historiographical tokens to the detriment of a deeper understanding of their cultural and political milieu. Neil Price’s The Sea-King and the Sorceress sidesteps these often sterile debates by examining the lives – and deaths – of more than twenty figures from the Viking Age and using them to shed light on wider themes, a bottom-up approach which is both logical and engaging.
A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently from the salons of Cairo to the palaces of Riyadh, from Atatürk’s Ankara to Khomeini’s Najaf, while keeping so many figures vividly in play.
When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days as his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci thought his career was over. He had become such an object of ridicule that a crisis PR adviser suggested he lie low for a few years before attempting to start again. Instead, the self-styled ‘front stabber’ from New York – who had naively assumed that a successful Wall Street career could equip him for the toxic political swamp of Washington, DC – launched himself into a round of media interviews, choosing to roll with the punches.
LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA: The latest issue features…
A bit of welcome news Kyle Wyatt
From Sophocles to Danielle Smith Troy Nahumko
Where does higher education go next? Spencer Morrison
Sandford Fleming’s cables and clocks Michael Ledger-Lomas
The next move in championship chess Mark Plotkin
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.
The Odyssey By Christopher Nolan (dir)
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
The most authentic thing about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is its densely braided narrative, but its tormented hero sounds like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies.
As Democratic Socialists rack up primary victories, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party looks increasingly out of touch.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
In novels written immediately after World War II, Wolfgang Koeppen mined the conscience of Germany.
Pigeons on the Grass by Wolfgang Koeppen, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
The Hothouse by Wolfgang Koeppen, translated from the German and with an afterword by Michael Hofmann, with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra
Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen, translated from the German and with an afterword by Michael Hofmann, with an introduction by Joshua Cohen
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
America’s centennial in 1876 was celebrated with a grand exhibition that projected an image of national unity and inventiveness in the anxious aftermath of civil war and recession.
Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future by Fergus M. Bordewich
Peter Magyar’s landslide electoral victory in April made clear that after sixteen years, Hungarians were tired of Viktor Orbán.
Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism examines how Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, by selling a vision of the future that very few people would want to inhabit.
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
Though a mystery to Darwin in his lifetime, the constant mutation of our genes is what allows for life’s magnificent diversity.
Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health by Roxanne Khamsi
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