Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague: Living Death in Our Times was published by Fitzcarraldo in 2023. She is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
I dreamed I was at an event to remember Frank Kermode and then found myself in the dark basement of a London restaurant, or rather a deep cellar adjoining a basement in which some kind of political party seemed to be taking place. Although it was hard to see and even harder to hear, the figure of Nigel Farage could be glimpsed standing in a corner at the far side of the gathering. For some...
She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed).
On the occasion of the publication of a reader of her work by Duke University Press and of this essay, Paul Myerscough interviewed Jacqueline Rose in front of an audience at the London Review Bookshop. An audio recording of the interview can be found here.
We live in revolutionary times. I cannot imagine now what it would have been like to be thinking about Rosa Luxemburg if the revolutions...
Jacqueline Rose discusses her book On Violence and On Violence Against Women with Jude Kelly.
Jacqueline Rose reads her piece on the connections between Frank Kermode and Nigel Farage.
Jacqueline Rose discusses the parallels between Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe, with Hilary Harper.
Jacqueline Rose discusses the full range of her work with Justin Clemens at the 2013 Melbourne Writers Festival.
Jacqueline Rose asks, for whom or what in 1950s and early 1960s America was Marilyn Monroe carrying the can?
Paul Myerscough talks to Jacqueline Rose about her career, from her groundbreaking work on feminism in the 1970s through to her more recent writings on Zionism and the place of fantasy in the world of...
Boris Johnson’s japes are comparable in neutralising effect to the softening charm of Tony Blair. How can such a matey, blokey person, ‘someone you could have a pint with’, possess darker, colder...
‘Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly...
Jacqueline Rose has written a timely and courageous book. One immediate sign of this is its dedication to the late Edward Said, and its rewriting of the title of one of his most important books,
There are good reasons, and a few bad ones, for lifting minor characters out of famous texts and putting them centre-stage. One bad reason might be that refiguring a large reputation quietly...
In the days of F.R. Leavis, English literary criticism was wary of overseas, a place saddled with effete, Latinate languages without pith or vigour. Proust is relegated to a lofty footnote in...
We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her...
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