Tag
London
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Reviving Evita
“With such an inviting, estranging cyclorama, this revived ‘Evita’ becomes an undeniable interpretation.”
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a part of a small band of Indian reviewers and authors invited to see what the fuss was over the Edinburgh International…
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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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Loving Pickwick
The amorphous literary period that directly preceded Queen Victoria’s ascension to the English throne in 1837 is notorious for true crimes of book history, from the suspicious disappearance of the middle chapters of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript to the regrettable posthumous burning of Lord Byron’s handwritten Memoirs. But these controversies have nothing on the mysterious…
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Must We Have Lives?
“Hermione Lee was very kind,” Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote of the woman who would later become her biographer. “Although she clearly thinks I am hopeless about feminism, and says this is the generation gap.” This anecdote appears nearly four hundred pages into Lee’s recent biography of Fitzgerald, nestled in a cluster of quotations meant to…
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The Cost of Copying
Two recent books about copying remind us how the digital age has made Bambis of us all: we struggle, as Disney’s fawn did, to find our balance on the ice, confused by the absence of the friction that makes the world navigable. It was only 15 years ago that Napster essentially removed the friction from…
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Abney Park Cemetery
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Salvation Army officers don’t die; they are “promoted to glory.” In Abney Park Cemetery there have been many such promotions, as most of the founding generation of the Salvos, including William Booth and his family, are buried here. Abney Park,…
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The Great [National] Novel
When Capital was published in Great Britain earlier this year, it was immediately heralded as the first important novel about the recent financial crisis. And this made sense since its author, John Lanchester, had already published, in addition to three other novels, an unusually cogent account of that crisis, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and…
