From the next issue

At the Republican National Convention

Andrew O’Hagan

There was​ lightning in the sky over Chicago, and I was waiting at the airport. An announcement echoed across the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on...

 

Women in Afghanistan

Mélissa Cornet

The question​ of women’s status has been central to the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, with more than eighty edicts curtailing their rights since the movement returned to power almost three years ago. The Taliban prohibits women from going to secondary school or university, from working in the public sector or for NGOs, from leaving home uncovered and unaccompanied, from visiting...

 

Bad Times for Biden

Christian Lorentzen

The debate​ last month between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered...

From the blog

Ireland’s Far Right

Daniel Finn

12 July 2024

By shifting the focus of public debate away from the housing crisis and towards immigration – or by presenting the housing crisis as the consequence of immigration, which amounts to the same thing – Ireland’s far right has performed a valuable service for the government parties. 

 

Indigenous Political Strategies

Thomas Meaney

The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the...

Podcast

At the Republican National Convention: Day Four

Andrew O’Hagan and Deborah Friedell

It’s the final day of the Republican National Convention. Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell dissect Trump’s marathon acceptance speech and ask what a second term could look like.

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Black Jewish Messiah?

Alexander Bevilacqua

David Reubeni​ posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the...

 

What’s a majority for?

James Butler

Keir Starmer​ is now the central fact of British politics. He has achieved an extraordinary majority. His preferences and commitments will shape the country. He has ridden a wave of revulsion at Conservatism into Number Ten. Desire for change wore social democratic dress, but disgust is also anti-systemic: the depressed turnout and the success of pro-Gaza independents, Greens and Reform...

 

Lives of Maecenas

Nora Goldschmidt

If you look up​ ‘patron of the arts’ in most European languages, you will find a variation on the name of Gaius Maecenas: mécène in French, mecenate in Italian, mecenas in Spanish, Mäzen in German, mecenas in Polish, mecenáš in Czech, mécenás in Hungarian, меценат in Ukrainian, Russian and Bulgarian. The term has been in use...

 

Tudor Art

Ulinka Rublack

Tudor art​ has a poor reputation. Compared to the works of the Northern and Italian Renaissance, 16th-century English paintings look provincial. Tudor patrons weren’t generally prepared to pay much for pictures, and were more concerned with the documentary function of a painting, its cost and size, than with its aesthetic qualities. A proclamation of 1563 recommended that London...

 

Blame it on the Olympics

David Goldblatt

Olympism,​ the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose...

 

Chigozie Obioma’s ‘The Road to the Country’

Blake Morrison

Kunle​ is a law student in Lagos with little grasp of what’s happening in the country. When his uncle asks, ‘You have heard that there is war in Eastern Region, abi?’ he shakes his head. He’s a lonely, ‘hermitic’ sort of boy. Since his transistor radio ran out of batteries, he hasn’t kept up with current events. Now term is over there’s no...

At the Movies

‘The Beast’

Michael Wood

The bad year​ in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines. They have...

 

Mandeville's Useful Vices

Colin Kidd

The​ Presbyterian ministers of my Ayrshire childhood never harangued their congregations, and were almost to a man – they were all men – mellow and avuncular. Authority figures policed behaviour – all the way down to disciplining boys who walked around with hands in pockets or shirt-tails hanging out – but nobody propounded moral values; ethics tended to be intuited...

At the William Morris Gallery

On Mingei

Rosemary Hill

Artistic influence​ may benefit from a degree of misunderstanding: it keeps it from lapsing into imitation. By the time William Morris launched the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s, it took a certain wilful ignorance to believe, as he and Ruskin did, that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals were anonymous artisans, working humbly for the glory of God. Three generations of antiquarian...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s revolutionary thought of the 20th century, truth and lies in the ancient world, and satire.

Read more about Close Readings 2024

Partner Events, Summer 2024

Check back for seasonal announcements, including centenary events for Kafka and James Baldwin, screenings at the Garden Cinema and more. 

Read more about Partner Events, Summer 2024
Events

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