The music and people David Stubbs gathers under the term ‘Krautrock’ mark precisely this definitive question of post-war German life: how to start afresh? Their musical innovations similarly bear testament to the inextricability of geography, of nations and wars, whilst also proffering a radical interrogation of these tyrannical logics. Krautrock is portrayed as blurring the stable boundaries upon which arbitrary identities are forged: ‘Man–Technik–Natur.’ No Führers. Transformation and renewal. Stasis and kinesis. Combinations best expressed, in music journalist Julian Cope’s phrase, as ‘a raging peace’. Krautrock was a many-headed Hydra, whose gestation exemplifies precisely the contingency of foundations that pervades and energises its most vertiginous moments. [read full essay]
Crime was a topic which Thatcher often referred to, especially during the 1979 general election campaign when she frequently talked about people wanting to feel safe walking the streets. She also favoured the use of corporal punishment and voted to bring back hanging whenever there was a vote on the topic in the Houses of Parliament. But in practice, her governments were not known for being especially ‘tough’ on crime. The memoirs of successive Home Secretaries in the 1980s reveal that Thatcher was content to leave them to run the Home Office and to bring forth whichever sorts of acts they wished to – despite the fact that crime rose during the 1980s in a dramatic fashion. [read full essay]
At the heart of the Booker Prize, there lies a contradiction. The Prize is, with very few exceptions, awarded, and intended to be awarded, to a novel which undersigns the premises of a humanism by which we are all unique individuals possessed not only of depth but of multiple dimensionalities. Its recipients should give an image of the individual, bearing the full weight of its Shakespearean contrariness, in time. Yet the victors, along with most shortlisted works, are also commended on the grounds of the recognisability of the personal worlds they portray: it is not just that these fictions communicate unique experience, they make of a unique experience a generalisation about the human condition whose truth is commonly attestable. [read full essay]
A new exhibition at the Barbican explores the relationship between photography and architecture in the epoch of modernity. It is testament to the enduring power of the city in the artistic imagination, exposing the aching desolation of the urban landscape, inhuman and austere – but also, conversely, its site as a crucible of resistance. [read full essay]
The potential for humans to take to the skies, before it became a stable and accepted means of travel, had connotations of blasphemy. There are reasons the sky is above: it is a reminder to humans that they should keep their humility tethered close by, if nothing else than to retain their place as man in God’s Kingdom. Lest we forget that God, in Genesis, after all, gave Man dominion over the earth and all its multitudes (not the heavens) and in any case, Daedalus’ loss… a punishment that could be wished upon no-one. [read full essay]
'Virginia Woolf: Life, Art, Vision' at the National Portrait Gallery is a assemblage of portraits, each one a moment captured, defined; but together, they form a diverse arena of images, collectively communicating the partiality of any single attempt to represent their subject. The exhibition as a whole forms a portrait, but an anti-authoritative one, built out of fragments and glimpses which represent their subject as multiple, fractured, mutable. [read full essay]
Scotland is not going to be an independent nation; neither, in its economics or its society is it very different from the rest of Britain, and the depressing thought is that those of us who live far from Scotland are going to face the same problems – in 2015, and repeatedly, until the majority of people who lack a financial reason to identify with the status quo have enough confidence in their own shared ability to replace it that the begin to see themselves as a class, that is, an alternative set of rulers in waiting. [read full essay]
As our relationship with the internet and the enormous amounts of information we read on it changes, so do our publishing strategies. There is a lot at stake in conversations about economies of attention online. The future of the online essay — maybe the future of the essay — depends on the publishing platforms we come up with. It would be too easy, too optimistic, too complacent to say that the internet liberates us from the mundane considerations of print, especially when thinking about the increasingly corporate structure of the web. [read full essay]
Like many children of teachers growing up in the 1990s, in my schooldays I became familiar with the name of an unlikely bogeyman. To the world he was known as Chris Woodhead, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools in England (1994-2000), though it was common in houses like ours to replace the first syllable of his surname with the shorter colloquial form of Richard. [read full essay]
The Oxford Examination Schools see a lot of action beside their official purpose. Here Christopher Ricks has displayed his agility and Geoffrey Hill his ferocity, during their respective reigns as Professor of Poetry. More recently the admirers of Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), Lord Dacre of Glanton and onetime Regius Professor of History, gathered here on a chilly January morning a few days before the centenary of his birth. Trevor-Roper’s literary executor, Blair Worden, welcomed the company – enough to fill the South School’s broad expanse – and said he believed ‘Hugh would be pleased, and indeed surprised.’ He also congratulated us on our range of ages. This range was technically rather than visibly wide; the glossy manes of a few young Prize Fellows of All Souls peeked out from the silver sea. [read full essay]
