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‘𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘷𝘦, of course, is a bittersweet elegy – for the old Western way of life, for the era of American expansion, for the cowboy. It’s also, perhaps too subtly, a critique of those things.’
@jrobertlennon.com revisits Larry McMurtry.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Classicist Mary Beard's extraordinary 2014 essay "The Public Voice of Women" from the @lrb.co.uk makes it clear that the desire to silence women goes back to Homer, and never stopped, and that can connect the Tates and these meltdown boys. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...
‘The fashion for dismembering illuminated manuscripts was rampant around the turn of the 20th century and hard to circumvent. Otto Ege, for example, a bookseller and lecturer, cut out pages from around fifty manuscripts to sell in newly compiled portfolios.’
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
On the podcast: is writing a poem work? In the first of a new series, ‘Poetry and the Turning World’, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider the concepts of work and play in the writing process, and explore three poems that address workplace experiences.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
‘The Sahara is now one of the most inhospitable places on earth, but not because of the desert. It is a dumping ground in which distant powers and states jettison their problems.’
Rahmane Idrissa on a human history of the Sahara.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘As so many aspects of our lives have become privatised and reduced to the nuclear family, so has the way people think about their health. But personal choice can only take us so far.’
Edna Bonhomme (@jacobinoire.bsky.social) on measles and vaccines, from the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
‘Working at 𝘎𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦, JFK Jr’s magazine, was never dull, despite the contradictions emanating from the editor-in-chief – and often because of them. Towards the end, though, the sense of impending trouble was strong and unmistakable.’
A Diary from Inigo Thomas.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The mantra, repeated ad nauseam in those years, was “competition drives up quality,” an assertion that anyone looking at, say, the privatised water companies or privatised train companies might greet with a hollow laugh.’
Stefan Collini on the crisis in universities.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the film’s cultural historical implications. The absence of references to the war only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic.’
@malcolmgaskill.bsky.social:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘One broker told me that he buys “conflict gold” from places such as the Central African Republic for around 40 per cent of its global value and then sells it to sanctioned Russians for much more than it’s worth.’
Claire Wilmot on Ethiopia’s gold.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
London Review of Books
Rebecca Solnit
www.lrb.co.uk
Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most...