Books
Insights and outings
“Until the 17th century, travel to and on the European continent was commonly the concern of missionaries and pilgrims. With time, it became codified, packaged; it could be visited and ticked off”
From our own correspondent
“For all that they purport to be intimate, on-the-hoof overflows of feeling and scatterings of snatched apercus, letters are usually just as artificial, laboured, and rehashed as essays, articles, or anything else that is written for public consumption”
Beat that
“Half a century since their break-up, the Fab Four grimly reaped to the tiresome two, the Beatles go on. Documentaries and dramas continue to be made, interviews are bigged-up, and last year, as so often, the Beatles made the top 10”
Hunting for meaning
“Some woozy sage slumped next to you catches your eye, cueing a directionless odyssey through time and space. The following morning, while drinking your coffee, you are at loss to say whether the man—it is most often a man—had really cracked some great mystery of the mind or was just five spliffs deep”
Dangerous tribes
A chilling, compulsive investigation into online extremist groups
Lapine revelation
Karen Harvey’s book on the ‘rabbit-breeder’ Mary Toft teases out the painful emotional drama behind an 18th-century medical hoax
Life and the living
The mysticism and pragmatism of Victorian philosopher-psychologist William James
A harness for history
Thomas Piketty is haunted by the failures of social democracy, but his own ideas for fixing society are far from novel
Last lines: Clive James
Fans of Clive James cherished his poetry as much as his other accomplishments. This is an excerpt from Ian Shircore’s new biography, “So Brightly at the Last”, the first full-length study of the man and his muse
Pastoral passage
Radiant description, linguistic precision and super-saturated dreamscapes in new collections by Matthew Francis and Stephen Sexton
China has a strategy and Britain doesn’t
A roadmap to better relations requires realism. Beijing’s interests and goals are openly stated—if you know where to look
The plague
Standpoint goes to press as the pandemic rages. So too does the search for blame and the political fall-out
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The censorious culture of the liberal Left is hostile to freedom of expression. The fate of the trans-rights movement evinces this pointless politics