A subplot running through Jonathan Coe’s most recent novel, Middle England, involves a feud between two garish children’s clowns that culminates in a ...
Tag: Europe
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
In Search of No. 70, Adalbertstrasse, Berlin
Bonanza Coffee Roasters is located in a quiet courtyard, tucked away from the hustle of the neighborhood of Kreuzberg in such a way that I completely miss ...
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing within the ...
Kafka: The Impossible Biography
The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing ...
Soccer for Intellectuals
Baseball has Roger Angell. Boxing has A. J. Liebling. Yet soccer, puzzlingly, has no writer of such caliber, no one who has managed to find in the sport a comparably inexhaustible source of literary ...
More Orwell
No political event in memory has been as shocking and bewildering as Donald Trump’s election. It doesn’t seem to belong to our history, the history we had and thought we would go on having. How to ...
The Book That Made Me: Multilingual
Speaking German alongside Spanish seemed as natural as placing scones next to the teapot on the table at teatime …
The Street and the World: Rua do Benformoso, Lisbon
A short walk from Lisbon’s central Baixa district—where tourists flock …
Neoliberalism Misunderstood
Philipp Ther’s lively new book offers a prime case in point for why the term “neoliberalism” is essential to understanding the last 30-odd years ...
B-Sides: Isherwood’s “Prater Violet”
Judging from his writing, Christopher Isherwood must have been an ideal guest at a dinner party: intelligent, witty ...
Two Islands, Two Fates: Inishbofin and Inishark, Ireland
To get to Inishbofin, an island nine miles off the west coast of Ireland, you take a ...
Planning Happiness: A Postcard from Christianshavn, Copenhagen
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This street used to be quieter, just an occasional bike rattling over the cobblestones along a ...
Benidorm After Brexit and the “Burbuja”
In the early 1950s, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza left Benidorm, the sleepy coastal town he governed, to make the 300-mile trip to Madrid by Vespa. He had an audience with General Franco ...
Americans in Bulgaria
Loving Eastern Europe is a tricky business. In theory, the term “Eastern Europe” is reductive and clumsy. In reality, it often feels deeply and self-evidently true. This puts those who document the ...
Forgery Fiction
Even Michelangelo was guilty of forgery. As the story goes, the young artist buried a sleeping Cupid he carved from marble so that it would pass as a Greco-Roman antiquity. Upon learning of its true ...
Against Despair
Despair is everywhere, and for good reason. Huge numbers of refugees are fleeing warfare and violence, while unceasing terrorist attacks are feeding the right-wing populist surge all across Europe ...
How to Be a Global Historian
If the past is still required to understand the present, then approaching the past globally is an absolute necessity. But what does it mean to “think globally” today? What does a truly global history ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
Roberto Calasso and the Irresistible Art of the Publisher
1 | Advice In judging Roberto Calasso’s brief, elegant book The Art of the Publisher, it might help to list the practical advice Calasso has to offer after 50 years in the trade. Or, if we have ...
