Tag Archives: Essays

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MARCH 19, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Nicholas Spice – Schubert’s Imagination; Daniella Shreir on Chantal Akerman; Tom Stevenson – Death of an Ayatollah; Joanna Biggs – Solvej Balle’s Time Loop….

Iran, Week One

The attack launched on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February was a textbook case of international aggression, justified in only the most cursory fashion by fictional Iranian threats and undertaken with no clear aims and no clear demands or terms. In announcing the war Donald Trump described it as a wholesale attack on both government and state. The US and Israel would ‘raze their missile industry to the ground’ and ‘annihilate their navy’. Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to ‘come out to the streets and finish the job’. By Tom Stevenson

Mummy’s Favourite

 The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, argu­ably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their act­ions. By Andrew O’Hagan

Marlowe’s Betrayals

As Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically dismal life of the man who wrote them. By Michael Dobson

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie

Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

Andrew O’Hagan

The Hedgehog Review – Spring 2026 Preview

Humanism in a Posthumanist Age

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘Humanism in a Posthumanist Age’ – What we are witnessing today is a cultural swerve away from the informing humanist idealism of the modern liberal democratic project.

Will Human Voices Wake Us?

Antón Barba-Kay

How Antihumanism Turned on Its Authors

Geoff Shullenberger

The Human Condition or the Conditional Human?

David Polansky

Up from Darkness

Alan Jacobs

Essays

The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg, and the Random Bullet

R.F. Foster

A Matter of Time

Witold Rybczynski

Managing the Facts of Life

Sarah M. Brownsberger

We’ve Been Getting the Ancient Greeks All Wrong

Colin Wells

The Consolations of Simulation

Paul Nedelisky

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MARCH 5, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jackson Lears – Brzezinski’s Cold War; Marlowe’s Betrayals; Alexander Bevilacqua visits Noah’s Ark; Caravaggio’s Clothes and more.

Lee Gillette, Neil Blackshaw, Ed Jesudason, Samuel Freeman, David Foglesong, Jim Holt, Michael Neill, Malcolm Parry

James Butler‘Need a lord on the board?’

HARPER’S MAGAZINE – MARCH 2026 PREVIEW

HARPER’S MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Tech Boys In Toyland’- Fear of Girls, Sperm Racing, and Silicon Valley’s Lust for Global Destruction…

Child’s Play

Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking by Sam Kriss

The Plot to Save America

Inside the movement to reindustrialize—and rearm—the country by Maddy Crowell

Out of Light

Caravaggio, La Tour, and the art of attention by Nicole Krauss

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE – MARCH 2026 PREVIEW

Commentary Magazine – A Jewish magazine of politics, high culture, cultural  and literary criticism, American and Israeli campaigns and elections, and  world affairs.

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘We Jews Have The Honor Of Being Hated’…

We Jews Have the Honor of Being Hated

Jews must cease hoping to solve anti-Semitism and make their own way forward by Bret Stephens

The Chutzpah of Yoram Hazony

by James Kirchick

‘Zio’ Is the New ‘N-Word’

The Pornography of Anti-Semitism

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – FEBRUARY 19, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Seamus Perry: Pluralism and Poetry; James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered; James Meek on Romania’s Far Right;

Seamus Perry · Pluralism and the Modern Poet: Pluralism and Poetry

‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.

Jonathan RéeKojève v. Hegel

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on The Phenomenology of Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The characters he filled it with, from the Master and Slave to the Sensualist and the Sage, sound rather like Mr Worldly Wiseman, Madam Bubble and Mr Sagacity in Pilgrim’s Progress.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – FEBRUARY 5, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Visions of America’

Made in Tehran

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History  by Vali Nasr.

No King

Daisy Hay

Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution by James Grant.


One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment by Samuel Scheffler


El Cid: 
The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary by Nora Berend



HARPER’S MAGAZINE – FEBRUARY 2026 PREVIEW

HARPER’S MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘America Goes For Broke’ – Inside the National Sports Betting Craze…

On Tilt – America’s new gambling epidemic

by Jasper Craven

The Sanctuarium – The Philippines reckons with its war on drugs

by Sean Williams

Another London – Excavating the disenchanted city

by Hari Kunzru

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JANUARY 22, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Joseph Torigian

The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan

On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd

Short Cuts: On Venezuela

Cicero: The Man and His Works by Andrew R. Dyck


Buckley: 
The Life and the Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE – FEBRUARY 2026 PREVIEW

February 2026 Issue - The Atlantic

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Donald Trump Wants You to Forget This Happened – January 6, five years later

Donald Trump Wants You to Forget This Happened

January 6, five years later

The Purged

Donald Trump’s destruction of the civil service is a tragedy not just for the roughly 300,000 workers who have been discarded, but for an entire nation.

An Act of Cosmic Sabotage

How Donald Trump tried to ground NASA’s science missions

I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well.

My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms