Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country ...Show more
Poetry and the Turning World: Money
In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous ...Show more
In 2022, France is marking the centenary of the death of the novelist Marcel Proust, the author of the 20th century masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past. In this archive edition of Witness History, Proust's friend, Prince Antoine Bibescu, recalls his conversations with the auth ...Show more
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) did little of note until he turned 38 years old - but from that point forward, he devoted the rest of his life to writing a masterpiece. The result, the novel In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes from 1913 to 1927, stands as one of the supr ...Show more
This week, Lauren Elkin on a Nobel Prize-winner's obsession with images; and Judith Flanders assesses bold claims about the origins of contemporary English.'The Use of Photography', by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer'La Langue Anglaise N'existe Pas: C ...Show more
UNLOCKED: Today we're talking Žižek's chapter in his book Absolute Recoil called "The Violence of the Beginning". The reading begins with the notion that there is "nothing prior to the loss" of the sense of lost origins. Žižek then sets into play the idea of the self-alienation o ...Show more