London Review of Books (LRB) – June 29, 2023 issue:

Noël Coward’s Third Act; Fassbinder and His Friends; Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva, and more…

Be like the Silkworm

By Terry Eagleton

Marx’s Literary Style 
by Ludovico Silva, translated by Paco Brito Núñez.

Working​ on Capital in the British Museum, plagued by creditors and carbuncles, Karl Marx complained not only that nobody had ever written so much about money and had so little of it, but that ‘this economic crap’ was keeping him from writing his big book on Balzac. His work is studded with allusions to Homer, Sophocles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and scores of other authors, though he was less enthralled by ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’ Edmund Spenser, an advocate of state terror in Ireland.

Can I speak freely?

Amia Srinivasan

Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving end of such remarks doesn’t mean that one’s own rights to ‘free speech’ are thereby imperilled; it might simply be a reminder that speech can wound.