London Review of Books

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In March, I described the way threats against my neighbour, Sara Fernández, a distinguished scholar of gender and sexuality at the Universidad de Antioquia, quickly escalated into an attempt to murder her because of her trade union leadership. I have not seen her since, and can only reach her via third parties. With luck, she will be heading into exile; she asked for official protection but was not given it. Mateo Martínez Ruíz has not been seen or heard from since 7 July. We have no evidence of his disappearance, and no witnesses, and that’s never a good sign. I know Mateo: he’s the brother of one student, and the cousin of another, at the Universidad Nacional in Medellín, where I work. We have had heated political debates of the sort that are needed in Colombia now more than ever, but have become too dangerous to sustain publicly – and would be even if the coronavirus disappeared tomorrow.

Pankaj Mishra

Neither Britain nor America seems capable of dealing with the critical challenges to collective security and welfare thrown up by the coronavirus. No less crushing is the exposure, as Rhodes finally falls, of the fact that the power and prestige of Anglo-America originated in grotesque atrocities and, as William James wrote in 1897, that ‘a land of freedom, boastfully so called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it’ was always ‘a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction’. The moralising history of the modern world written by its early winners – the many Plato-to-Nato accounts of the global flowering of democracy, liberal capitalism and human rights – has long been in need of drastic revision. At the very least, it must incorporate the experiences of late-developing nations: their fraught and often tragic quests for meaningful sovereignty, their contemptuously thwarted ideas for an egalitarian world order, and the redemptive visions of social movements, from the Greens in Germany to Dalits in India.

On Dorothea Lange

Joanna Biggs

‘Iwould like to be able to photograph constantly, every hour, every conscious hour,’ Dorothea Lange told an interviewer in 1963, two years before she died. There had always been constraints on how she could photograph: first, the limp that remained after she had polio when she was seven, growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey in a German immigrant family; then the need to make money at...

Catherine Lacey

Nicole Flattery

Catherine Lacey’s last book, Certain American States (2018), a short story collection, began with an epigraph from Annie Baker’s play Circle Mirror Transformation:

LAUREN: Hey. Um. This is kind of weird – but do you ever wonder how many times your life is gonna end?

(Another silence.)

SCHULTZ: Uh … I’m not sure I know what you –

LAUREN: Like how many people...

At Tate Modern

Steve McQueen

Colin Grant

Steve McQueen trained as a painter before turning to video art. His early films were silent, monochrome, focusing on his own body because it was cheaper than hiring an actor. Many of the works in his retrospective at Tate Modern (which won’t reopen when the museum does later this month because it doesn’t meet ‘museum regulations for social distancing in enclosed...

In the latest issue

16 July 2020

The ‘Batrachomyomachia’

Ange Mlinko

One wag subtitled it ‘Homer in a Nutshell’. The Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, was thought by the Romans and its early English translators to be a minor work of Homer’s from the eighth or ninth century BC, though its linguistic anachronisms and allusion to Callimachus place it as a likely Hellenistic epyllion. Its three hundred lines in...

Tom Crewe

‘Women have always written about men,’ Jane Miller remarks in Women Writing about Men (1986),

but they have needed to be extremely circumspect about doing so. To read as a woman is to confront that circumspection as a mode of being and a kind of language … Of course, I too want to hear what women writers have been telling us about women. I am almost certain, though, that it...

From the blog

On George Mackie

Ben Campbell

17 July 2020

George Mackie is 100 years old today. I first met him a few years ago, at a party celebrating an earlier birthday. My father, Peter Campbell . . .

Church, Museum, Mosque

Julian Sayarer

16 July 2020

For the second time in its history, Hagia Sophia has been turned into a mosque. The first time was after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople . . .

Colombia’s Disappeared

Forrest Hylton

16 July 2020

In March, I described the way threats against my neighbour, Sara Fernández, a distinguished scholar of gender and sexuality at the Universidad . . .

‘I May Destroy You’

Arianne Shahvisi

15 July 2020

At the end of the first chapter of Émile Zola’s 1887 novel La Terre, a sower looks on encouragingly as an adolescent girl helps . . .

In Defence of Juries

Francis FitzGibbon

13 July 2020

‘A good jury turns into a little community,’ Baroness Hale has said, ‘working together in the interests of justice.’ . . .

Covid-19 and Other Diseases

Sophie Cousins

9 July 2020

According to figures compiled by researchers at McGill University, the Covid-19 pandemic is predicted to cause an additional 400,000 malaria . . .

When plague came to Wittenberg

Lyndal Roper

6 July 2020

Plague struck Wittenberg in August 1527, ten years after Luther posted – or didn’t post; historians disagree – the 95 Theses . . .

‘Homegrown’

Alex Abramovich

8 July 2020

‘I fell in love with Neil’s pain,’ Carrie Snodgress said, recalling her life with Neil Young. Apparently, she meant physical . . .

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Image shows the March on Washington, 28 August 1963 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy).

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Image shows Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan in A Taste of Honey (1961), directed by Tony Richardson (PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo).

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Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of...

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In the next issue: Alan Bennett’s ‘The Shrine’; Adam Tooze on the trade war between China and the US; Frances Stonor Saunders on the mystery of her father’s suitcase.

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In the latest issue

16 July 2020

Podcasts & Videos

Amia Srinivasan and Thomas Jones

David Runciman and James Meek

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adam Shatz

Susan Pedersen and Joanna Biggs

Sonia Gandhi, Rupert Beale and Thomas Jones

Good news from Bury Place!

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