Whatever else the Second World War was about, it was, on both sides, a war for empire. Taking a global view leads to a different picture of the war. For example, when did it begin? Most English speakers would say 1939, with Germany’s invasion of Poland. But by then Japan had already been at continuous war… Read More A New History of the Second World War
Julien Benda’s classic book on the toxic mix of intellectuals and power is its own paradox Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda Reviewed by Gustav Jönsson The title of Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs – The Treason of the Intellectuals – has become a synecdoche for a tradition that upholds truth in the face of moral… Read More Treason of the Intellectuals
… like Ulysses, I drive myself forward,… but move, as before, backward – Joseph Brodsky, “I am like Ulysses” IT TOOK ODYSSEUS 20 years to return to Ithaca, and James Joyce’s Ulysses had to wait 67 years before reaching the Russian reader. In both instances, a war contributed to the delay. In the novel’s case, it was the… Read More José Vergara’s “All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature”
As its title suggests, The Dawn of Everything is an ambitious book. The authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, (one whom passed away while the book was in press) survey the whole past life of biologically modern humans in an effort to broaden the ambit of modern social thought. They aim to thereby open up the possibility… Read More A False Dawn? A Review of The Dawn of Everything
On the night of November 8, 1926, policeman arrived at Gramsci’s apartment in Rome. Initially, he was sentenced to five years of “confined exile,” and began serving out his sentence on the island of Ustica. While there, Gramsci endeavored again to set up a cultural school. He offered lessons in history and literature, which were… Read More Hegemony Changes Everything: Antonio Gramsci's theories of how the rich stay rich
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman Reviewed by Kit Wilson Radical change, as any good historian will tell you, never just comes out of nowhere. Even the most seemingly unexpected shifts in history can, with hindsight, be traced back to specific material, intellectual and political preconditions – even if,… Read More Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?
Mann returned to Europe in 1952, never to leave again… it was politics that had brought him to America, and politics that pushed him away. The mind is always in exile.. “I am an American,” Thomas Mann said during a radio interview in 1940. If he sounded relieved, it was because he was: He had… Read More Book review: How Thomas Mann escaped to America and waged a moral battle against Hitler
Dostoevsky and Flaubert should be studied together as progenitors of the modern novel. The end of 2021 witnessed an unusual literary event: the bicentennials of two geniuses of modern fiction. They were arguably the leading novelists of their respective countries: the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11) and the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (December 12). No… Read More John Rodden: The Master of Petersburg and the Martyr of Style
‘Some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game’ Seventy years after its publication, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism Minima Moralia is a work of exile. Published just over… Read More Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism. By Peter E. Gordon
One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a… Read More Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
After the truth-shower 