The New Criterion – The September 2024 issue features‘The red star returns’; The trouble with Delmore; Churchill endures; Charles Ive’s “let out” souls; Theater, Arts, Music and The Media….
Arresting scenes
On John Constable’s The Hay Wain & the foundations of the West.
We write as The New Criterion’s annual period of aestivation enters its home stretch. The cicadas are buzzing, the days are noticeably shorter, and the leaves—some of them—are already edged with brown. Certain summers feature quiet expanses of lazy days. This one was different. In July, Donald Trump, except for the tip of his right ear, dodged a would-be assassin’s bullet; Joe Biden dropped (or, we now know, was pushed) out of the 2024 presidential race but, as of this writing, remains president; Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, stepped into the vacancy and magically became the new candidate for president, choosing the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
Times Literary Supplement (August 14, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Guy vs the Spies’ – Robert Cecil’s secret intelligence network; The new Cold War; On annihilation; What anxiety means; G.K. Chesterton’s Notting Hill…
This week’s @TheTLS, featuring Diarmaid MacCulloch on Tudor and Stuart espionage; @owenmatth on cold wars past and present; @TomCook24 on Shakespearean sexualities; Fiona Green on Emily Dickinson’s letters; Anna Katharina Schaffner on the Rhine; @suzifeay on Gayl Jones – and more pic.twitter.com/uHdRgW0dOs
London Review of Books (LRB) – August 7 , 2024: The latest issue features ‘Henry James Hot-Air Balloon’ – “The Prefaces” by Henry James; Trivialized to Death – “Reading Genesis” by Marilynne Robinson; Different for Girls By Jean McNicol…
The first time the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.
In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything: ‘I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them,’ as James put it. The ‘disowned’ works included some early gems such as The Europeans. The labour of ‘supremely adopting’ the stuff he still thought worthy was grinding. He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it doesn’t sell.’
A week before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese women’s gymnastics team, was forced to withdraw from the competition by her national association. She had been reported to the Japan Gymnastics Association for smoking and drinking (on separate occasions, once for each offence). The president of the JGA, Tadashi Fujita, announced that Miyata had been sent home, and bowed deeply.
Times Literary Supplement (August 7, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Paper Dreams’ – Dinah Birch on William Morris’s contradictions; Cancelled left and right; Downfall of the West; Sly old Chaucer; Beowulf, hero of the Northern World….
This week’s @TheTLS, featuring @dlbirch1 on William Morris; Rana Mitter on the West; @marywellesley on Chaucer; Claire Lowdon on Evie Wyld; Rosemary Waugh on Annie Ernaux’s The Years on stage; @anna_aslanyan on maps; M. C. on the Booker longlist – and more pic.twitter.com/HERuq3MWPp
Literary Review – August 3, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Rise and Fall of the Cromwells’; Thom Gunn’s demons; Prams and paintbrushes; Children of Atatürk; Friedrich in nature…
Times Literary Supplement (July 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Generation Anxious’ – Jonathan Haidt’s bleak vision of modern childhood; Rebuilding broken Britain; The woman who stalked the world; German Expressionism at Tate Modern and Twisters..
Times Literary Supplement (July 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘World at War’ – Humanity’s appetite for organized violence; Should we have babies; Posture panic; The boy on the burning deckand Wales…
London Review of Books (LRB) – July 18 , 2024: The latest issue features ‘Bad Times For Biden’; James Butler on ‘What’s a Majority For?; Poems by A.E. Stallings and Rae Armantrout and Thomas Meaney on Red Power Politics…
The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Stephen Sedley
Poem: ‘Hell’
Rae Armantrout
The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future by Franklin Foer
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple
The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward
At the William Morris Gallery: On Mingei
Thomas Meaney
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
Times Literary Supplement (July 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Ven ice Preserved – La Serenissima down the centuries; Why revolutions fail; Eating ourselves to death and Ozempic nation…
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