How British Is It?
The clock hangs in room 509, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s glittering new British Galleries, which reopened in March 2020 after four years of...
No Regrets
Of all the many British and American spies who served the Soviet Union, George Blake was arguably the most intriguing and certainly one of the most...
The Toll of the Clock
Time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see...
Hemingway’s Consolations
1. “Hemingway will be the best known of you all,” the Parisian bookseller Adrienne Monnier told a gathering of mostly Anglophone writers and literary people in...
The Ballad of Ban the Bomb
He wanted to meet as soon as possible,Desperately wanted me to collaborate with him to fulfillA years-overdue commission he had from the State of Israel.He had...
Conceiving the Future
In 1969, a year after Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a book predicting that a “population bomb” would set humankind on a path to widespread famine...
Stalin’s Lawyers at Nuremberg
It was surely a sign that the rule of law was finding its way into international relations when, after a world war of unmatched brutality during...
Ashbery’s Cliffhangers
When we say that a poem is “good”—not with the dubious implication that it’s not great but with genuine satisfaction—are we unconsciously echoing Genesis, “And God...
Designs for Living
The Memorial to the Fallen of the Lješanska Nahija Region, designed by Svetlana Kana Radević, stands on a small hill in Barutana, Montenegro. Concrete tendrils rise...
Whose Freedom?
Last fall the student council at the University of Wisconsin unanimously voted to demand the removal of a statue of Abraham Lincoln from the campus, on...
