LRB Winter Lectures 2010-2024

So Eliot was sensitive to certain manifestations of the uncanny, and to terrors that might well cause shuddering. We have now to ask a more difficult question: why did those lines of In Memoriam affect Eliot so exceptionally, move him to use ‘shudder’ as a laudatory critical term?

The very question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every engagement he ever had, he never owned an apartment, and he asked his literary executor to destroy his papers, after which that contractual relation was to have ended.

In the mid-20th century the last airholes in the European pressure-vessel were sealed up, and the heat turned up high. Fortunately the vessel burst before it could reduce everything, all our cities, all our persecuted peoples, to ash. And yet even now, in diligently humane times, Europe is a place in which pressures, some creative and some destructive, repeatedly build up. 

Can capitalism evolve new forms to deflect the seemingly inevitable crisis, or do we need some entirely different social and economic order?

Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding. Of what, then, is she the decoy?

Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.

The New Deal was fracturing, but the impetus behind it was far from over. One of the distinctive features of Ira Katznelson’s book is that he sees the New Deal period as extending well beyond the 1930s. The mid-20th century was the age of ‘fear’ and there was still plenty to be afraid of. 

Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.

Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.

It was exciting to think that no novel had ever captured this new kind of history, where military lies on a global scale were revealed by a bunch of sleepy amateurs two foot from an Aga.

A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And then the moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed, for a moment, a desperate lack.

The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight period of democracy itself.

Lacan​ said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves.

We have a situation in which a lecturer cannot speak her mind, universities bring in the police to deal with campus protests, and graduate students cannot write publicly about what is happening.

The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the Robin Hood myth to their advantage.