A collection of 820 posts
Danny Rensch never became the world’s greatest chess player. But his improbable rise from traumatised cult child to dot-com wunderkind represents an even more impressive achievement.
Jon Lee Anderson’s powerful new book on Afghanistan reminds us that the justness of a cause is no guarantee of its success.
Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.
Angertainment capitalises on ordinary democratic conflict by selling it back to us as spectacle.
Art can’t give us immortality, but it can give us something better. It can give us what Roy Batty longed for: more life.
What realists like Emma Ashford deride as America’s “reactionary defence of the status quo” is in fact a prudent effort to preserve a world order of unparalleled value.
In his deliberately archaic new rendition of Homer’s epic, Jeffrey Duban takes a defiant stand against the modernisation of classical literature in defence of a disappearing tradition.
Van Morrison turns eighty.
The Beatles phenomenon is being mined for more meaning than the people at its centre ever intended to convey.
Power To The People sparks a debate over art, censorship, and John Lennon’s legacy.
Other plots may attract both right and left-wing authors, but successful geopolitical thrillers are always informed by a conservative view of the world.
Amid literary subcultures, competition has always been fierce and unrelenting and has become even more so in our age of elite overproduction. On social media, these embittered rivalries play out in public amid a chorus of backbiting worthy of Chekhov.
A new book presents a cogent diagnosis of the ills plaguing American society, but also reactionary prescriptions for ameliorating them.
Love is transformative—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is clear-sighted about the fact that that transformation can be for the worse.
The campaign to strip novelist John Boyne of his Polari Prize longlist honour shows that gender extremists still seek to control progressive arts subcultures—even as mainstream society rejects their illiberal movement.