The War Poets, and their continuing centrality in British cultural life, from GCSE syllabi to media outlets where they are often the only poetry to feature in any given year, are at the heart of a modern liberal value complex that recuperates Remembrance Day’s human factor while leaving the door open for revanchist nationalism. It is not that their poetry is bad per se – indeed Owen and Rosenberg in particular are, in their best moments, capable of truly affecting and strange writing. Yet there is something much too comfortable and comforting about their reception. The real singularity of the best World War I poetry springs from the deep realisation on the part of the soldiers in Flanders and elsewhere that they were fighting not for a tangible communal goal, like the later repulsion of Fascism in World War II, but for an obscure web of motives derived from an epochal crisis in British capitalism and imperialism. [read full opinion]
Owen Hatherley, The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space
reviewed by Samuel Gregory
The post-1991 narrative surrounding the Soviet Union is as fixed as that country’s command economy. For right-wingers, it represents the last gasp of resistance to the market’s supremacy and the dawn of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, which proclaimed capitalist democracies to be the final form of human government. For many on the left it embodies a betrayal of Marx’s ideas, a perspective summarised by Owen Hatherley, who describes how the Union was seen as ‘an albatross, an... [read more]
To explain the ousting of President Robert Mugabe after 37 years in power, Zimbabwe’s military general chose his words with great care. The army had taken over but the coup was ‘not a coup’. President Emerson Mnangagwa – then Vice-President – spoke of Mugabe not as a target but as ‘my father, my mentor, my revolutionary leader’ who was ‘surrounded by what others described as criminals.’ Decades earlier, when Mnangagwa was Minister of State Security, the leading party... [read more]
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality
reviewed by Jakob Horstmann
Like many fields of scientific scholarship, philosophy has long been plagued by the gradual shrinking of its research questions. Most contemporary academic philosophy concerns itself with ever smaller technical details within once vast areas of enquiry, not even bothering to pretend that it has any direct link to everyday life. With this in mind, Technic and Magic. The Reconstruction of Reality is a highly unusual book in at least two ways. Firstly because Federico Campagna unapologetically... [read more]
Examining who we are means exploring who we once were – and the intervening meander between the two selves. More specifically, it is an examination of where we once were and what that distance now means to us. This is all the more profound when the subject has gained privilege – a phenomenon as much geographical as it is sociological. In a recent wave of new literature, these differing selves have been viewed through the prism of identity, but the strongest often look at the silent... [read more]
I had never heard of Christine Schutt before coming to Pure Hollywood, her third collection of short stories and sixth work of fiction. This review came about at the recommendation of an editor friend, one knowledgeable of a different literary zeitgeist to the one I usually dip into. Schutt has many accolades to her name: a Guggenheim Fellowship, teaching posts on American MFA programmes (among them Columbia and Syracuse), stories in places like Ben Marcus’ celebrated New American Stories... [read more]
Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia
Rebecca Solnit’s 20th book consists, like a couple of its predecessors, The Mother of All Questions and The Atlas of Trouble and Spaciousness, of her pieces from the preceding few years. Anyone who has been a close follower of hers will recognise much of the book’s contents from The Guardian or Harper’s (where she is the first woman to write the magazine’s ‘Easy Chair’ essay). Here, they have been grouped under slightly obscure headings: ‘American Edges’ includes essays on the... [read more]
Anyone acquainted with the history of the British state, whatever that is, has some idea of the Northcote-Trevelyan report, the 1854 document that catalysed the creation, overseen largely by Sir Charles Trevelyan, of the modern Civil Service. To a lot of civil servants it’s a kind of Year Zero, to be spoken about in reverent terms; to historians it’s a bit more complex, but still the presiding single moment of the consolidation of the liberal-bureaucratic state in the UK.... [read more]
'Jack Robinson' is a pseudonym of the poet and novelist Charles Boyle who also runs CB editions, an enterprise regarded by many admirers as the best of all British independents. In 2017 he took time off from publishing other writers to concentrate on publishing two books of his own, the first of which, An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B., is about the 19th-century French novelist Stendhal (real name Marie-Henri Beyle, something of an obsession with his near-namesake Boyle). Of this... [read more]
Franco Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility
reviewed by Alexandre Leskanich
Organised around three interconnected themes of potency, power and possibility, Marxist media theorist Franco Berardi’s latest book offers a sharply lucid and penetrating (if not always adequately elaborated or defended) diagnosis of our present predicament, summarised as the ‘age of impotence’. Berardi presents the current political malaise as merely the latest stage of an entropic decline, the self-destructive decay of a system long irredeemable, yet which effectively obscures the means... [read more]
They’ve been busy. Venus as a Bear arrives scarcely two years after Vahni Capildeo’s last full collection, the Forward Prize-winning Measures of Expatriation, and even then it doesn’t contain everything we’ve seen from them since, an 'agender [writer] in a female body', Capildeo takes they/them pronouns. For their funniest turn in last year’s 'Persephone in Oulipo', they offer a parody of ‘mainstream English lyric’. A lyric ‘I’ narrates the experience of sitting down to write... [read more]
