HUMANITIES MAGAZINE (April 10, 2025): The latest issue features Eliot Noyes, pictured here on the television show Omnibus, brought a sculptural grace to his work.
Public art and politics
COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE (February 5, 2025): The ‘Travel Issue’ features The Romance and Risk of a Big Adventure….
The inimitable Wodehouse
Roderick Easdale marvels at the ‘pure word music’ of P. G. Wodehouse, whose aristocratic comedies are still treasured as English-language classics
All I have to do is dream
Nod off with Tree Carr as she investigates what it means when our sleeping hours are filled with enchanting visions of wildlife and the natural world
London Life
· Giles Kime admires The Goring’s stylish new look
· All you need to know in the capital this month
· Arabella Youens visits the best second-hand markets
Travel
· Richard MacKichan dives into Canada
· Kate Eshelby treks across Pakistan
· Rosie Paterson takes a chance on Italy
· Adam Hay-Nicholls follows in Bond’s tyre tracks in the Swiss Alps
· Rosie Paterson ventures into the US wilderness
· Hetty Lintell selects top travel accessories
· Christopher Wallace relives a Cape Town-to-Cairo adventure
· Pamela Goodman visits a faithful old geyser
Jason Goodwin’s favourite painting
The writer and historian selects a pencil drawing alive with energy
Ruin and rebirth
In the second of three articles, John Goodall tells how Bramham Park in West Yorkshire rose from the ashes of an 1828 fire
The legacy
Octavia Pollock places David Garrick centre stage for his role in revolutionising the theatre
Interiors
The latest lamps and lighting options, with Amelia Thorpe
Pottery winners
Tiffany Daneff talks terracotta with Beth Tarling, a Cornish collector with a passion for flowerpots
Foraging
All flash and no flavour — John Wright pans the scarlet elfcup
Arts & antiques
Carla Passino reveals the tale of the Royal Academy’s Prince and ponders the identity of the sitter for a 16th-century Venus
Let there be light
Matthew Dennison enlightens us on the history of the chandelier from its origins as a candlelit ‘crown of shimmering gold’
Alright, petal
Catriona Gray meets the talented botanical illustrators celebrating 30 years of chronicling Chelsea Physic Garden’s plant collection
REASON MAGAZINE (January 23, 2025): The latest issue features ‘You Can’t Evict Polly’ – How the Fair Housing Act enabled the rise of emotional support parrots, frogs and emus….
The move “seeks cheaper food for Argentines and more Argentine food for the world.”
American tariffs will increase the price of final and intermediate goods, hurting our own consumers and domestic manufacturers.
THE NEW STATESMAN MAGAZINE (January 16, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Disruptors’ – Elon Musk, Donald Trump and the hostile takeover of America…
Inside the mind of the billionaire at the heart of American power. By Quinn Slobodian
With the fertility rate falling across the West, there is much more affecting parents’ decisions than the economy. By Madeleine Davies
The fires ripping through LA show that, here, beauty and danger are two sides of a coin. By Sanjiv Bhattacharya
QUADRANT MAGAZINE (December 28, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Trump Takes Charge’…
Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States anoints him as “Disruptor in Chief”, a vital role with world-historical significance. Trump’s ascension to this position was presaged in Ayn Rand’s stupendous novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), whose central character, John Galt, confronts a similarly sclerotic America, which he sets out systematically to disrupt in a radical, transformative manner. This highly controversial novel is important in illuminating what is at stake at the cultural level in the struggle to come, and in emphasising the scale and direction of the challenges facing Trump, his administration and his supporters. Atlas Shrugged is also valuable because, together with Rand’s earlier novel The Fountainhead (1943), it offers in compelling fictional form a powerful, necessarily hyperbolic, statement of the philosophical values that must be reasserted to make America great again.
If Hillbilly Elegy was compulsory reading for observers of American politics wanting to understand Trump’s first presidency, Walter Isaacson’s biographical portrait of Elon Musk is mandatory holiday reading for those wanting to understand how Donald J. Trump turned so many critics into passionate supporters and won a resounding presidential vote in 2024, and to gauge how his nation-reshaping policies might play out over the next four years.
Jacqueline Rose on violence and its origins
In response to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’.
‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership in Tokyo envisaged by the former US secretary of war Henry Stimson failed to materialise.
‘In the UK between 1970 and 1991, about 1250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV (and many of them with Hepatitis C, too); by the time the Infected Blood Inquiry began, about three-quarters had died, the majority of them from HIV-related causes.
By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood
by Cara McGoogan.
Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal
by Caroline Wheeler.
‘Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.’
By Bee Wilson
The Israeli government is taking a leaf out of Ariel Sharon’s playbook to try to undo what it regards as Sharon’s biggest mistake. This essay is on the ‘regime change’ planned for Gaza, and the carnage it entails.
We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.
Animal Liberation Now
by Peter Singer.
Justice for Animals
by Martha Nussbaum.
Boomers Daily 