Pride (In the Name of Love)
Pride, a great new British movie directed by Matthew Warchus, is as warm and witty as Billy Elliot or Kinky Boots but as fierce as a rampaging Ken Loach. It’s 1984 and the miners’ strike...
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The Great Unknown: Marcelo Gleiser and the Limits of Science
We must recognise that because of the very nature of human inquiry every age has its unknowables. The question we need to address, then, is whether certain unknowables are here to stay or whether...
read moreComedy = Tragedy + Time: A Chat With Natalie Haynes
You know that bit of clip art your computer used to throw up when you typed in drama? The two classical masks, one happy, one sad? That’s sort of like Natalie Haynes’s career. Not in a...
read moreDaring to Live: Gail Sheehy’s Passages
“You’ve taken LSD, you’ve jumped out of airplanes, you dressed up in hot pants to walk the streets with hookers; for heaven’s sake, you embedded yourself in the Irish civil...
read moreSix Degrees of John Guare
MERIWETHER [LEWIS] Never give up the enormity of this dream. Keep telling the lie. The United States will always be the last undiscovered terrain — even if we have to move the white spaces...
read moreBad Moon Rising: Natalie Haynes’s The Furies
Policemen and doctors will tell you they know when it’s a full moon, because the A&E units fill up more quickly than on other nights of the month. Sometimes I would think the same was true...
read moreThe Sea, Inside & Out
Seeing “the watery part of the world” was, for Melville’s Ishmael, a way of “driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.” One feels it’s probably the...
read moreMiddlemarch Revisited: Rebecca Mead on the Life of a Classic
It’s funny that Middlemarch, a place name that could scarcely sound more English, should be without lexical precedent in the maps of its homeland. As Rebecca Mead informs us in her lovely...
read moreLegalize Joyce!
A June day in Dublin would be a fractal of Western civilization. – Kevin Birmingham Kevin Birmingham’s splendid first book is so packed with smut hounds, tortured geniuses,...
read moreQuantum Mechanics, Walk With Me: On Interpreting David Lynch
Books about film directors fall broadly into three categories: biographical, industrial (behind the scenes), and theoretical. David Lynch, an artist whose experiments in popular surrealism have seen...
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