Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
reviewed by Stuart Walton
'Of the making of books about drugs these days, there seems no end,' said Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian, opening a review of my own contribution to the field 14 years ago. And nor should there be. While the amorphous terminology never changes, drugs – by which we might mean the entire field of intoxication practices, licit and illicit – go on multiplying as fast as freelance laboratories can alter their molecular structures to produce new compounds. Meanwhile, the ancestral substances... [read more]
In 1868, Mary Anne Disraeli was awarded a peerage by Queen Victoria. With the new title of Viscountess Beaconsfield, she became a darling of the English public. Newspapers sang her praises, calling her the ‘First Rose of England’ and claiming that the Queen had never done ‘a more popular act’. Mary Anne was seen as the ideal wife of a great man: the outgoing Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The new title not only recognised her own virtue, but that of a husband who had asked the Queen... [read more]
Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital
reviewed by Dominic Fox
Philosophy promises something. Students of philosophy are enticed by this promise; amateur philosophers keep the flame alive. Professional philosophers are in a sense professional promisers, makers and curators of philosophical promises. No matter how skeptical or reticent they may be, how epistemically humble or ontologically parsimonious, they maintain the promissory structure of philosophy. One day, but not yet – not yet, but soon – philosophy will deliver on its promise.
The... [read more]
'When did poems start having to fuck with people constantly?' Sam Riviere, 2014.
With Kim Kardashian's Marriage, Sam Riviere continues many of the themes of his earlier collections, 81 Austerities (2012) and Standard Twin Fantasy (2014). An uncompromising examination of contemporary life, this collection explores ideas of celebrity, artifice, performance and voyeurism, with the humour and irreverence that has become characteristic of Riviere's poetry. Charting Kim Kardashian's 72-day... [read more]
Capitalism is a greedy, vampiric fiend in Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story. It gnaws at the lifelines of well over 99% of India’s population and mainlines its acquired riches into a select few bejewelled, oily capitalists. In a nod to the Occupy! movement, she proclaims: ‘[the 1%] say that we don’t have demands … they don’t know, perhaps, that our anger alone would be enough to destroy them.’ The first page of the first essay sets the tone: ‘in a nation of 1.2 billion,... [read more]
Frances Stracey, Constructed Situations: A New History of the Situationist International
reviewed by Julian Cosma
Winston Churchill’s approach to communism, especially in the interwar period, was distinctly, almost obsessively epidemiological. His speeches and essays were peppered with quotes such as ‘Bolshevism is not a policy, it is a disease’ or alternatively, a ‘pestilence’. Individual figures were not exempt from medical designation. Lenin was a German-bred bacillus sent to inflect Russia, and Trotsky was ‘like the cancer bacillus.’ This anti-bolshevism was buttressed by respect for... [read more]
In an interview a few years ago, Sarah Waters outlined a kind of mission statement. 'What I'm after,' she said, 'is a gripping read, with stuff going on behind it.' The romp-factor of Waters’s fiction is well-known, and is probably at its most potent in 2002’s Fingersmith, which was, in part, an homage to Victorian crime fiction. On the surface her style, though studded with the language of her historical period, is plain and unfussy, and this may sometimes give the reader a feeling that... [read more]
Paul Fung, Dostoevsky and the Epileptic Mode of Being
reviewed by Andre van Loon
The trouble with Dostoevsky can be knowing where to start. It doesn't seem to matter if you're a novice reader, a seasoned aesthete or a professional literary critic. He's too verbose, too serious; too intent on piercing the heart of the matter in hand (‘and till my ghastly tale is told/this heart within me burns’, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner declared). There are those who find all this extremity a little unbearable. But Dostoevsky held ideals, and his work overflows with designs for... [read more]
Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was an intense trip through the mind of an anxious American college student in Spain and the finest work of fiction to explore feelings of fraudulence and fakery since David Foster Wallace’s story ‘Good Old Neon.’ The narrator is alienated by the disconnect between his experience and his self-presentation – an issue deftly dramatised through the mesh of a foreign language and culture. In 10:04, Lerner’s latest novel, the 33-year... [read more]
Georges Perec, trans. David Bellos, Portrait of a Man
reviewed by David Anderson
No matter how fulsomely Scarlett Johansson gave fleshy form to Griet, the serving-girl at Johannes Vermeer's house in Delft, the Girl with a Pearl Earring was never a real girl. As the little text-box hanging next to Vermeer's canvas, in the Mauritshuis, explains:
It is not a real portrait, but a ‘tronie’: a fantasy-head. Tronies picture a certain type of character – in this case, a girl in exotic clothing, with an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in the ear.
‘A... [read more]
