Everyone knows what the Rorschach tests are. Like Freudian slips, boycotts, quislings and platonic friendships, however, it was long ago forgotten that they had been named after an individual human being. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss doctor and psychiatrist with curiosity about the visual arts, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He created the tests
In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a
The history of an army is essentially the history of its deeds. The history of an army within an army is more intriguing. The Praetorian Guard, a modern term, was founded, or rather formalised, around 27 BC by Augustus for the protection of the emperor and his family. Hitherto, cohors praetoria had been a generic
The greatest of Bach’s 224 cantatas is BWV 109, ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben’. Its subject — the title translates as Mark 9:24, ‘I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief’ — is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennett’s new book, From Bacteria
Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathisers, the stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are set largely among the Vietnamese diaspora on the west coast of America, where Nguyen himself lives, having fled to the US from Vietnam with his family in 1975. They mostly feature characters juggling the lives they’ve made in
On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint
