“Widespread anger over evil counsellors and the exercise of agency via petitioning that dominate contemporary political discourse have fascinating antecedents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
[Poetry] — Simon Robson
“the Boots perfume counter assistant looking / like Dracula’s daughter”
[Essay] The Adviser’s Hubris: Cummings’s Cromwellian Machinations — Josh Mcloughlin
“Following on from Johnson’s turn as the sacrificial lamb, Cummings treads the political boards as contemporary history’s schemer-in-chief, thrasonical and hubristic in the advertisement of his unassailable power.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
[Fiction] ‘The Talented Higgs Boson’ — Mary Peelen
“You have to admit that in this way, the Higgs has sort of a sheen of godliness.”
[Fiction] ‘Clarity’ — Mark Halpern
“Among the many words they didn’t use was judōteki-kōgeki—literally, passive-aggressive—which had recently infiltrated the Japanese language via Western theories of psychotherapy. But did Japan need such a word? Maybe that’s just the way people are. Especially as relationships wear on.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
[Fiction] ‘Train Ghosts’ — Yash Seyedbagheri
“Imagine Mother, a silhouette in lavender.”
[Fiction] ‘Debt’ — Franck Vanhee
“If I lend you a letter w, you must return that same letter w, the oman in the bookshop said.”
[Essay] Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze in the World of Twin Peaks — Cam Scott
“Lynch and Frost are especially masterful where this feeling of estrangement is concerned.”
[Fiction] ‘The Ghost of You’ — Christopher Moore
“He may as well have fucked me into the mattress, he was so possessed with it.”
[Essay] ‘What’s Going On?’: The Moral Philosophy of A Serious Man — James Mcloughlin
“The Coens do not put characters such as Larry through the mill gratuitously. Rather, they fiercely interrogate aspects of their own identities in order to fully understand themselves and their world.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bacon’s paintings insist, with some violence, that affects are not sensational properties but exist in relation to an outside—whether other bodies, as Deleuze concedes, a Barthesian ‘ongoingness’ that connects body to atmosphere, or a primordial being-in-the-world, as in Heidegger’s Dasein.”
[Essay] Kidnapping North Korean Cinema: Kim Jong-il, Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee — Hannah Streck
“Kim Jong-Il, the all-powerful fan-boy, kidnapped his favourite artists to make movies that would put North Korea on the cinematic map.”
[Essay] Grayson Perry and the Politics of Taste — Jonathan Webster
“Perry submerges himself in these cultures without judgment and, through his art, communicates and legitimizes alternative forms of cultural capital.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2019 — James Mcloughlin
“Coming up on Christmas, the 20-book mark seemed like a doomed dream.”
[Essay] Thought and Judgement in Hannah Arendt and Hamlet — Oliver Deasy
“Following her experience as a journalist at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt’s thinking about thought became more sophisticated as she began to consider the relationship between immoral actions and the activity of thinking.”
[Fiction] ‘The Fall of the Owl’ — Tim Harding
“The one thing she never felt while she was dreaming, she thought, was suspicion that she was in a dream.”
