White Peonies
This is how it happens, one morningThe ground is only the ground, & thenGreen shoots through the rich brown loam.I learned the word loam when I...
Thinking Without Banisters
The proliferating crises of the American republic have prompted a revival of interest in the life and work of Hannah Arendt. Her book The Origins of...
In the Shadow of Slavery
In How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith evokes the horrors of slavery, from the discovery of the New World through the Civil War, and the...
Playing Fast and Loose
Rachel Cusk’s novels are merciless. She believes nerviness and irritation are necessary habits of mind to explore and put down on paper. Difficulty is her bread...
Liberation Psychology
They were out to get him. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian...
Europe’s Great Emporium
In 1563 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted two versions of the Tower of Babel, one in Antwerp and the other in Brussels, after he had married...
Soldiers of Solidarity
In the early 1930s a California teenager named Delmer Berg left home to work as a farmhand for room and board plus seven dollars a month....
‘Invitations to Dig Deeper’
Nineteen thirty-six was a momentous year for George Orwell, then aged thirty-two. On January 31 he went north to Lancashire and Yorkshire to collect material for...
A Language of Geometric Forms
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was given a small show at the Museum of Modern Art forty years ago, but the large exhibition there now is the first opportunity...
