November 2015

Last night I dreamt of a New York landscape that doesn’t exist. A historisization, not a history. The lost city of Acropolis, curated from and by and for film.

Trump’s popular appeal may hinge on the fact that he is an elder baby boomer. Clearly the candidate’s on-stage behavior speaks to the generation’s contrarian disposition. For Trump rejects tradition with persistent rebelliousness.

As far as your questions goes, I’m going to have to defer the question the same way I defer my loans: indefinitely.

What is most fascinating about all this is the fact that we, Kafka’s readers also return but, like Sancho Panza, we must entertain the possibility that in following Kafka we have decided to follow a modern Don Quixote.

It is difficult to bid farewell to Gamal al-Ghitani: a friend, an author, a true Cairene who taught us how to read and admire our history, walk in our cities, feel the power of narrative, and stand in awe of its literal and allegorical significations.

The rise of a woman photographer with the advent of photography and of women’s emancipation presents an irresistible moment of reflection.

“I think it’s the architecture,” Dina says, after delivering a line during freshman orientation at Yale that earns her a year of therapy and a small audience of concerned white people writing in notebooks.

In the resurgent ‘field’ of lyrical British nature writing, a prosaic form given to delight in the relationship of language and landscape, to relish and revel in the world and in words, Robert MacFarlane is one of the leading lights.

The Beat Generation’s undergraduate auxiliaries at Yale in the 1950s—edgy, bad boy, unafraid—had neither love nor money for leather, but they grasped the idea that fashion was the placement of the product of self.

The Booker prize website says ‘It is a measure of quality of the original drafting that the main ambitions of the prize have not changed.

On the train, out in the fields, I was among the only people whose 4G connection was working, and so I became an information-relay station for frightened Italian vacationers and Parisian students returning home to their families.

Before the Tiananmen Square massacre, I was a rebel poet, volatile and impulsive, who liked picking fights and telling tall tales. I’d won more than 20 state literary prizes, and I figured that one day I would earn international fame in the literary world.

June. The sound of his voice, things he would say. I wish I could freeze them so that I could thaw them out now and again. I know, she says. Me too.

The last room of the exhibition gathers together portraits of friends and exiles done in Bordeaux, and puts at the centre the masterpiece Goya painted in 1820, Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta. It is the show’s most daunting moment.