If an unremarkable opening sentence is like an escalator that lowers you down into an essay—the trajectory is predictable, the pace regular and slow—Janet Malcolm’s are more like diving boards that ...

For quarter of a century I. S. Poretsky (or Ludwik or Eberhard or Ignace Reiss) was one of the most prominent secret agents of the ussr. Now, after more than 30 years of ‘withdrawal and ...

The Turner Prize is a hype-generating exercise for the Tate and the contemporary art world, an annual award to British artists under the age of fifty for particular exhibitions or other contributions ...

The situation recalled Tom Nairn’s verdict on the Labour administration of Harold Wilson in 1965, which he said had not just ...

Moreover, he has already breached the historic firewall around the far right by using the AfD’s parliamentary backing to pass ...

The Kurdish forces, then, appear to believe that swallowing this bitter pill is the only way to preserve their social base ...

The ambition of this book—Mark Greif’s first—is to identify a set of ideas from the relatively recent past, dated with arresting precision to the forty years from 1933, which bear on the present we ...

'Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in ...

What is ‘the anti-globalization movement’?footnote 1 I put the phrase in quote-marks because I immediately have two doubts about it. Is it really a movement? If it is a movement, is it ...

What weight should be given to the role of ideas in moments of radical change, as opposed to that of material interests and forces? From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, rise of Marxism and ...

What questions for critical social theory are posed by the capitalist slave regimes of the Americas? An inquiry into the political, economic and social-reproductive dimensions of enslaved and ‘doubly ...