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 ...

In the sphere of Marxist aesthetics, Goldmann’s unqualified relegation may have been somewhat premature. In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the charge of ‘historicism’ remains generic ...

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 ...

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 ...

One might think that ‘after Communism’ is an uncomplicated idea, experience, or socio-political condition, but in the two countries of South-East Asia which I intend to discuss—namely, colonized, ...

Albert Soboul’s work on the Parisian Sans-Culottes in the Year Two of the French Revolution footnote 1 begins with the victory of the Montagnards over the Girondins, a bloodless political triumph ...

'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 ...