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David RuncimanWaiting for the Future
This is what Trump does to us: he makes it hard to know what still counts as routine. Those confounding qualities have now been compounded by the Midterms. More
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Itemised
I will call Knausgaard’s kind of writing ‘itemisation’. We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by. More
Death of an Airman
Van Dyke Fernald liked flying – ‘skylarking’, as he called it, was ‘glorious’, the ‘star stunt’ of the war. There were breathtaking views of the Alps and of the Adriatic and Dalmatian coastlines; the gloom he’d felt on the Western Front seemed magically to lift. A pilot from his squadron described Venice ‘glittering like a pink opal in the warm early sunlight’. A classical education led these young men to frame their experiences metaphysically; leaving the earth felt like separating body and soul. ‘We moved like spirits in an airy loom,’ Cecil Lewis recalled. More
A Kazakh Scam
The site is so remote that everyone there does a continuous tour of duty lasting several weeks before going on home leave, just as they would if they were stationed on an oil rig in the North Sea. I look outside. The sodium lamps around the perimeter are fizzing into life. It isn’t just the panopticon-style design of the building, the orange jumpsuits and the extremely tight security that convey the sense of having entered a penal colony. More
What would it be like?
More than two years after the referendum, there is still a possibility that the UK will fail to reach a withdrawal agreement and an agreement on future relations with the EU. If a deal cannot be reached by 29 March next year, when the UK will cease to be a member of the EU, the consequences will be severe; many of them will also follow if a withdrawal agreement is reached but not an agreement on future relations. More
