A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle

T.J. Clark

‘Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That’. It knows we know what it refers to. But...

From the blog

What changed?

Mouin Rabbani

17 January 2025

For reasons that have little if anything to do with US national security or foreign policy, Donald Trump has made clear he does not want to be diverted by a foreign crisis as he re-enters the White House. Given that several Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip hold dual US citizenship, Trump will not countenance presiding over a hostage crisis like the late Jimmy Carter, but insists on a resolution that has echoes of Ronald Reagan’s assumption of office in 1981.

 

Among the Mystics

Patricia Lockwood

Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black...

 

Solidarity Economy

Susan Pedersen

Book titles​ are like city buses: they bunch up and arrive in packs. When historians were obsessed with identity, collective nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb...

 

Reagan’s Make-Believe

Jackson Lears

Afew days​ after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold...

 

Karl Polanyi’s Predictions

Stefan Collini

When​ did the ‘modern’ era begin? For the European imagination across more than a millennium, the most significant divide was between antiquity and what followed, such that for some centuries ‘modern history’ was held to have begun with the fall of Rome. Applying a different filter, the category of the ‘Middle Ages’ indicated the post-Renaissance sense of...

Give your mind a good stretch

Give your mind a good stretch

Subscribe to the LRB this January – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

 

Snobs, Swots and Hacks

Jonathan Parry

When we think​ of the fashions of the 1890s, several objects come to mind: the tennis racquet, the golfing cap, the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original

 

LA on Fire

Colm Tóibín

It was​ all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?

In the...

 

On Elfriede Jelinek

Becca Rothfeld

Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying...

 

Savarkar’s Nationalism

Raghu Karnad

Ihid​ the covers of the books I read about Savarkar for this piece. I wanted to be able to read in public without worrying about the judgment of strangers; without looking like another affluent Hindu man being red-pilled into ancestral resentments. I was wary of being seen reading about Savarkar and wary of writing about him. The former might upset anyone who saw me; the latter might upset...

 

Balzac’s Places

Raymond N. MacKenzie

In​ 1842, with eight highly productive years of writing still ahead of him, Balzac wrote a preface to his Comédie humaine, which already comprised dozens of books. He defended the morality of the work, and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no...

 

Candy Says

Nicole Flattery

Candy Darling​, the transgender actress and Warhol superstar, was born in Queens in 1944 and grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island. She was raised as Jimmy Slattery – named after her father, a gambler and alcoholic who worked as a cashier for the New York Racing Association. As Cynthia Carr writes in her biography, Darling broke with her Jimmy identity early: ‘She was always...

At the Whitechapel

On Peter Kennard

Brian Dillon

Peter Kennard​ is an expert in the obvious. His art – if that is the word – seems all polemic and assertion, with little in the way of ambiguity, connotation or aesthetic import. Photomontage, which has been his primary form for more than fifty years, is always in focus, its borrowed elements (however grainy, stark or blurred) arrayed on the same legible plane, all to the point...

 

Tales from Hoffmann

Polly Dickson

Having reached​ a point in his career when he could swat away the advances made by editors of literary magazines, E.T.A. Hoffmann asked a particularly demanding publisher to disabuse himself of the ‘unfortunate notion that I am suffering from a writer’s diarrhoea whereby, with every evacuation, some little story or novel makes its exit!’ In the same letter, written in...

Diary

Remembering Nan Shepherd

Fraser MacDonald

In the months​ following my parents’ deaths, I decided to buy a flatbed scanner as a partial fix for the drifts of paper they had accumulated after sixty years in the same house – receipts, letters, photographs, notes and diaries. I found that scanning their old 35mm slides kept their absence at bay. Scanning is a robotic task. Stretch the marquee tool. Preview the image. Select...

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