David Trotter

‘Shall​ we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with...

Andrea Arnold​ is best known as a director of films about young working-class women determined to get some joy out of a life that has been shaped by the needs and desires of others (not all of them men). By the time we meet these women, it’s generally too late for introductions. Someone, it seems, has gone ballistic. The films duly drop us in mid-rampage. People don’t just leave...

On 2​ january 1931, Valentine Ackland sent her new lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, a book about bisexuality. ‘After reading it carefully,’ she reported with evident relief, ‘I discover that you and I are admirably suited to each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation. ‘Do we do it in alternate spasms, do you think, like synchronised oysters ... or is one both at once?’ The book’s author, Theodore J. Faithfull, described on the title page as ‘principal of the Priory Gate School’, had something altogether less strenuous in mind. To him, bisexuality did not concern sexual preference. Rather, it was a way to acknowledge the bipolar presence in an individual of the ‘attributes, instincts and desires generally attributed to males and females respectively’. One is bisexual psychologically, Ackland explained. She was the sort of person whose ‘psychological sexual balance’, in Faithfull’s terms, demanded the frequent ‘discharge of libido’. When it came to libido, others might prefer to ‘receive’ and ‘retain’ rather than to discharge. By Ackland’s account, Warner belonged to the second category.

Jananne Al-Ani​ is an artist whose recent work has done much to illuminate the ways in which modern media can resemble a process of delineation: a drawing or writing with light (photo-graphy) or with motion (cinemato-graphy). The resemblance is established in Shadow Sites I (2010), which reinscribes by means of its own kind of graphic manoeuvre an already existing inscription. A shadow site...

The problem with Garbo is that she rapidly became, and still remains, iconically iconic. It isn’t just that when we talk about Garbo we’re talking about what it means to be talked about – to the extent that the person she was and the films she made now seem almost beside the point. It is rather that, to judge by the tone of much of the commentary, the person and the films were never the point in the first place.