March 2016

From London Review of Books: Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she assumed in the women whom he met and slept...

On January 12, 2016, late at night, I was called on my Albanian telephone by an unknown Italian number. It turned out to be Lorenza Baroncelli, Consultant for Urban and Cultural Strategies to Prime Minister Edi Rama and project manager at the Serpentine Gallery of Hans Ulrich Obrist, another...

For a week or so it was open season on the antiwar coalition. One effect was to scare the Greens and cause the party’s former leader Caroline Lucas to resign from the STW committee.

How to relate philosophical thought to literary practice? And, conversely, how to illuminate issues presented in narrative literature by having recourse to systems of philosophy? These are the two preeminent questions that Martin Paul Eve asks himself and answers impressively in his recent study Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault...

You can spend your whole life thinking of death. Or soaring from it. My father was the opposite of Glück’s — steeped instead in the earthly, the decimal point, and the profit margin.

It may seem curious to begin with Dante and pass on to the Children’s Rabbits’ House; but I require both to explain what it is I mean by Limbo; no such easy matter on trying.

“No weather will be found in this book,” Mark Twain declares in the opening pages of his 1892 novel “The American Claimant.” He has determined to do without it, he explains, on the ground that it usually just gets in the way of the story.

The nights I could not sleep, I would walk. There is an idea that London never sleeps; this is not quite true. There is a tidal lull, a drowsy half-stillness in those hazy hours between its periods of madness.

by Jeremy Fernando … one is photographable, ‘photogenic’, and this is perhaps the catastrophe, that one can be photographable, that one can be captured and caught in time … — Hubertus von Amelunxen … the tragedy of the photographic object, the object that is photographed: that in order to preserve...

As Facebook increasingly becomes the site of work-related activity, alongside what's left in this degraded age of true amical interaction, I've come to think of it as a sort of cloaca, through which both the shit and the joyous stuff of life pass indiscriminately.

Dearest Max, A letter. And fair warning—this is a letter about the afterlife, so read on only if you wish to contemplate such things.