'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]
As the final curtain fell on the glory days of printmaking, a new star of the ‘American Scene’ was in the ascent; the age of Edward Hopper would establish itself in popular consciousness - a shift that was to etch itself upon the psyche of modern art-history in a way that lithography no longer could. By the time of his death in 1962, Martin Lewis was all but forgotten by a world that had once embraced and celebrated the mastery of his craft. [read full essay]
With the UK government gearing up to mark the forthcoming 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the Conservative education secretary Michael Gove caused a minor media storm by claiming that anti-war accounts of the conflict were an insult to those who served in it, calling for a more ’patriotic’ version to be taught instead. He was roundly slapped down. As James Heartfield explains, Gove’s sentimentalism is entirely misplaced. [read full essay]
There is no philosophical concept more commonly misused, misinterpreted or misunderstood than that of dialectic. At the same time, there are few that can match its significance. Dialectics sit at the heart of Hegelianism, they are the pivot around which Marxism turns and their roots stretch back to the first principles of Buddhist and Daoist thought. John P. Clark writes an articulate defence of the form, explaining its nuances and arguing that only through a truly dialectical social theory can we hope to challenge the contradictions of late capitalism. [read full essay]
The figures would suggest the book industry is doing well, but that seems to be mainly down to sales of cookbooks and ghost-written celebrity autobiographies. Lively, independent presses are still out there, but they are increasingly few and far between. From the initial influx of American capital in the 1970s to today’s myriad mergers and ‘fusions' Robin Baird-Smith reflects on how 40 years of brazen commercialism has squeezed independent publishers almost entirely out of the picture. [read full essay]
The influential academic and literary critic FR Leavis has cast a long shadow over English literature. Looking back over his own student years, David Stubbs recalls being wowed by Leavis's brilliance and passion, while also being exasperated by his withering disdain for the popular culture of the post-war era. [read full essay]
