LRB Readings

Diane Williams reads her story ‘Have a Seat in the Big Black Chair’.

It isn’t wholly fanciful to envisage an aggressive Parliament determining that a judge who has stood up to the government on an issue of legal principle has failed to behave well, and using its majority in both houses to procure the judge’s dismissal. That, as Montesquieu said of a putative loss of the separation of powers, would be the end of everything.

Katherine Rundell reads her study of the Greenland shark, which can live for 500 years. 

It isn’t a secret that China’s debt bubble, Europe’s divisions and America’s irrational political culture pose a challenge to the functioning of what we know as the world economy. What caused the panic last month was the realisation that Covid-19 has exposed all three weaknesses simultaneously. 

Twelve years after she published The Second Sex in 1949 she was still receiving letters from women who told her that it had ‘saved me’; psychiatrists, she heard, gave it to their patients. It was the book that brought her the most satisfaction; she was gratified that younger women now wrote as ‘the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom’. (Less pleased was Norman Mailer, whose first wife divorced him after reading it.)

There is a difference between a politician deciding your fate and its being left to impersonal chance. But it isn’t a dif­ference that matters much when lives are on the line. When something has to be done – and something always has to be done, even if it’s nothing – then what mat­ters is what it leads to.

Like sturgeons and swans in medieval England, public information began as royal property. Today, we understand more vividly than ever before that information is also a commodity: I have it, you don’t; if you want it, you must pay me for it; if you don’t, I will use your lack of it to control you. Against this, and very reluctantly, a public ‘right to know’ has been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.

A post-broadcast era need not be a post-democratic one; an increasingly plural public sphere could be a resource as much as a threat. The BBC’s hegemony in Britain affords it opportunities to defend its own role and the role of public service broadcasting generally. It is a commonplace that it has many admirers but few friends. Now it is under naked attack by the government, it may find it has more than it thought.

People on the left call for a united front against the virus. Liberals are determined to hold the government to account for everything that has gone wrong. In the West, panda-huggers say no other government would be doing better under the circumstances; dragon-slayers are cheerleading for the end of communist rule, as they do every time there is trouble in China. Whatever happens, those arguments won’t change.

Colin Burrow ranges from Homer to Ian McEwan in his search for the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction, in this LRB Winter Lecture.

In​ the cold autumn of 1629, the plague came to Italy. It arrived with the German mercenaries (and their fleas) who marched through the Piedmont countryside. The epidemic raged through the north, only slowing when it reached the natural barrier of the Apennines. On the other side of the mountains, Florence braced itself.

So far, in the first few days of actual Brexit, the Johnson government has ganged up with the EU on the three hottest issues of the day. And there is plenty more to come.

Richard​ Holbrooke is the only American diplomat since the Vietnam War to have become a full-throttle celebrity, as likely to appear in the tabloids clutching a woman as putting forward a policy proposal in Foreign Affairs.

Despite abundant evidence from around the world, many people still find it hard to accept that flagrant lying is no longer a disqualification in public life, and that it might in fact be an attraction.

I get the sense that Jia Tolentino must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one.