‘He is small, wiry and ugly; she has the unpleasant face of a despotic prioress of a Catholic nunnery’: Isaac Deutscher’s impressions of Sartre and Beauvoir, as reported in the latest issue by Gonzalo Pozo.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/gonzalo-pozo/i-must-start-completely-alone
‘It would be easy to read this as a send-up of climate activism, as a satire of those who wade in without foresight and run the risk of getting things wrong. But for the characters it’s already too late.’
Ben Walker on @[email protected]’s Venomous Lumpsucker:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/ben-walker/kinda-wispy
‘If Nazism had demonstrated the triumph of the superego’s capacity to punish, with “Hitler daddy” as the authoritarian father, only a maternal approach could avert future catastrophe.’
@[email protected] on mid-century child psychoanalysis:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/mary-hannity/two-year-olds-are-often-cruel
‘As Lydia and Luca join the migrant trail, hoping to make their way across the border to the US, the tone turns from titillating to tedious. The characters are vessels for Cummins’s incoherent ideas about trauma and her superficial research on Mexico.’
http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/christian-lorentzen/goldfinching
Can't believe we're talking about American Dirt again...thought this was the final word https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/christian-lorentzen/goldfinching
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/SomersErin/status/1618614832370184192
Polish journalist and Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher left France ‘on the last civilian boat’, reaching London just in time to hear Chamberlain’s declaration of war. He never returned to Poland. Gonzalo Pozo explores Deutscher’s wartime memories:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/gonzalo-pozo/i-must-start-completely-alone
‘Anyone who has handed a bag of cheap Roman bronzes around a room of bored undergraduates will have seen first-hand the way it electrifies the atmosphere. Coins make history feel real.’
Michael Kulikowski on coins, hoards and hoarding:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/michael-kulikowski/what-the-badger-found
Harry wants to love. He wants purpose. He’s nobody’s ‘spare’. He can’t quite say it out loud, and neither could his aunt Margaret, but he’s pissed about being number two, and he takes all the unfairness and makes of it a Molotov cocktail.
Andrew O’Hagan:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/andrew-o-hagan/off-his-royal-tits
Showing a single digital ad to a single user involves, on average, emitting between roughly a tenth and a whole pint of carbon dioxide. And... this could happen 400bn times/day http://getpocket.com/@jamesmart_in/share/8299915
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/jamesmart_in/status/1619241529855414273
“Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?”
—Owen Hatherley on the Battersea redevelopment https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/owen-hatherley/in-battersea
Time has made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare. Or closer to a certain Shakespeare, who loves terrible jokes and cheerfully allows them to accompany violence and distress.
Michael Wood re-watches Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n03/michael-wood/at-the-movies
