Recently I was delighted to come across a new book about Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau’s God, by Richard Higgins from the University of Chicago Press. It rekindled the initial thrill of encountering Walden (subtitled Life in the Woods) as an undergraduate English major. I fantasized about living in mid-19th century Massachusetts with Thoreau and other luminaries of American…
To learn of the last minutes of Henry Nowak’s life would be shocking and distressing under any circumstances. The stabbed teenager begged officers for help, as they handcuffed him before realising their mistake. To watch those final moments, on the police body-cam footage released this week, is all the more immediate, and unbearable. The outrage…
In Germany, it is a Brandmauer, a firewall. In France, it is the cordon sanitaire – a refusal by mainstream parties to do deals with the far right. That resolve has weakened in recent years, but naming the taboo still serves an important function. To invigilate the line where radical conservatism turns to ultranationalism, it…
Fashion has always sat uncomfortably in the great art institutions of the West, the question of whether it belonged under the same roof as masterworks and heroic marbles a subject of perennial debate. After all, these creations weren’t hung on a wall or put on a pedestal; they were (cue dismissive sniff) worn. They may…
