Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Rory Scothorne, 4 January 2024

You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as  David Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces...

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Even the Eyelashes: Inca Mummies

Erin L. Thompson, 4 January 2024

The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those...

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When Paris Sneezed: The Cult of 1789

David Todd, 4 January 2024

The awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American...

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Who’d want to be English?

Tom Shippey, 4 January 2024

The Hundred Years War created a sense of nationhood, especially in France. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was...

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Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance...

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Friend or Food?

Alexander Bevilacqua, 14 December 2023

In Indigenous Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia, feeding someone – whether human or animal – expressed a duty of care. Once tamed, animals lived alongside humans in companionable relationships. The...

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Funhouse Mirror: ‘Capitalism and Slavery’

Christopher L. Brown, 14 December 2023

Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and...

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Case-endings and Calamity: Aldine Aesthetics

Erin Maglaque, 14 December 2023

In his twenties and thirties, Aldus Manutius was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious...

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Wessis and Ossis: Traces of the GDR

Neal Ascherson, 14 December 2023

It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through...

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Monumental Folly: Heliogabalus’ Appetites

Michael Kulikowski, 30 November 2023

Nowadays, if this prodigy of wickedness is remembered at all, it is for an Alma-Tadema painting showing the emperor smothering his guests in a shower of roses. Polite society no longer tolerates the Orientalist...

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Searching for the Bee: Rarities and Marvels

Helen Pfeifer, 30 November 2023

For the 13th-century Muslim scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini and his contemporaries, to contemplate the wonders of nature was to contemplate the majesty of God, so much so that cosmography was a mainstay of...

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A National Evil

Jonah Goodman, 30 November 2023

At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the...

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‘We’ve messed up, boys’: Bad Blood

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 16 November 2023

Ultimately, the companies responsible for producing and distributing infected blood products paid more than a billion dollars in compensation worldwide, but most victims never got a penny.

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‘The Refugee Problem’

Leila Farsakh, 16 November 2023

The brutality of Hamas’s attack shattered Israel’s definition of itself as a post-Holocaust sanctuary that guarantees protection for the Jewish people inside and outside its boundaries. Israel’s...

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Kettle of Vultures: A History of Interest

Jamie Martin, 16 November 2023

Pleasure is supposedly more valuable today than it will be tomorrow; deferral has a cost. But to the canonists, unlike the capitalists, this made no sense. Time wasn’t something that could be bought...

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Bourgeois Stew: Alexis de Tocqueville

Oliver Cussen, 16 November 2023

In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate,...

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Big Six v. Little Boy: The Unnecessary Bomb

Andrew Cockburn, 16 November 2023

‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership...

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The Leaflet

Francis Gooding, 2 November 2023

Leaflet drops informed people that because of the actions their leaders had taken, or because there were insurgents hiding among them, they should immediately leave a proscribed area. Continuous air strikes...

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