Three generations ago, Britain and the United States joined forces to propose the establishment of a revamped international rules-based system to remake the world. This was initially articulated in a document that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, signed in August 1941. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were persuaded to join the
In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is
Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party? Plato answered that question centuries ago with his sublime Symposium, a gripping, novel-like account of a gathering of Athenian notables, which is also a powerful philosophical exploration of the force of Eros, or love. We know that the feast is supposed to have taken place in
Arms outstretched, head thrown back, flounced skirt rippling over a raised leg. The 1942 photograph of Sophie Maslow dancing in her own creation Folksay makes her look as if she is performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or some MGM musical spectacular. Yet Maslow was a radical artist, who asserted that modern dance was
Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there,
Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In
I don’t know what books Rachel Reeves keeps at her bedside, but, since the Treasury still seems to be setting the UK’s China policy, I heartily recommend that she read the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s magnificent On Xi Jinping. Ideology and -isms may or may not be Reeves’s thing, but while the book
I probably won’t be the only one to say this of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection: it made me feel seen, and not in a good way. The novel takes aim at aspects of modern life, from social media to remote working and interior design trends, that aren’t obvious subjects for serious literary attention. Latronico, a philosopher
One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are
In the early 20th century, the world went ‘raving mad on the subject of radium’, according to George Bernard Shaw. The newly discovered element was considered a miracle cure, used to treat about 150 medical complaints. And it was fashionable: society ladies drank afternoon tea in rooms filled with radium vapours, and cosmetic companies developed
