October 20, 2022 Issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Two Elizabeths

The queen presided over the death of a British world and yet was enormously successful in keeping alive the monarchy that symbolized it.

Emily Berry

Last Poem

a poem

Darryl Pinckney

‘She Captured All Before Her’

It used to be that people complained how little they knew of Queen Elizabeth. Toward the end, her remoteness was treasured.

Jenny Uglow

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World

by Sinclair McKay

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin

by Kirsty Bell

Joshua Cohen

Lucky Guy

Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.

Breaking History: A White House Memoir

by Jared Kushner

Tomas Unger

Alcaraz vs. Cilic

a poem

Leslie Jamison

The Bear’s Kiss

What do we learn when the boundaries between humans and animals collapse?

In the Eye of the Wild

by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis

Lamb

a film directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

by Andrea Wulf

Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits

by Peter Neumann, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

Sue Halpern

The Specter of Our Virtual Future

The metaverse opens up a new and seemingly infinite opportunity to extract data and sell ads.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

by Matthew Ball

Mark Ford

‘An Age of Prudence’

On the centenary of The Waste Land, the archives continue to yield new information about Eliot and his life.

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound

by T.S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot

Eliot After The Waste Land

by Robert Crawford

The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition

edited by Ronald Schuchard

Ian Johnson

China: Back to Authoritarianism

Xi Jinping, who is about to be granted an unprecedented third term as China’s leader, has turned out to be an ambitious strongman who has remade the political system and expanded his own power.

Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi

by Victor C. Shih

Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao

by Joseph Torigian

Frances Wilson

Agatha Christie’s Nightmares

Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman

by Lucy Worsley

Caroline Fraser

Trouble in River City

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the American Midwest

by Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno

My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains

by Jessa Crispin

Peter Brooks

Resurrecting a Polyphonic Past

The Betrothed is a kind of historiographical novel that invites the reader to enter the dynamic of reading and writing history.

The Betrothed

by Alessandro Manzoni, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Michael F. Moore, and a preface by Jhumpa Lahiri

Geoffrey O’Brien

Keep Your Eye on the Kid

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life

by James Curtis

Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

by Dana Stevens

Mary Wellesley

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages

edited by Roberta Milliken

Anahid Nersessian

LA Elegies

Two poets take up meter and rhyme to consider the city of Blade Runner and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

The Discarded Life

by Adam Kirsch

My Hollywood and Other Poems

by Boris Dralyuk

Neal Ascherson

Hugging the Shores

Colin Thubron’s latest travelogue takes him down the Amur River and through the borderlands between Russia and China.

The Amur River: Between Russia and China

by Colin Thubron

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Brian C. Wilson

Robert Macfarlane

A Fireball from the Sands

Ecocide, toxic masculinity, fear of death, and more: the Epic of Gilgamesh’s themes could be transcribed from yesterday’s newspaper.

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic

translated from the Akkadian and with essays by Sophus Helle

Tim Parks

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

by David I. Kertzer

The Pope and the Holocaust: Pius XII and the Vatican Secret Archives

by Michael Hesemann, translated from the German by Michael J. Miller and Frank Nitsche-Robinson

Issue Details

Cover art
Volker Hermes: Hidden Jacometto, 2019
(based on Jacometto Veneziano’s Portrait of a Young Man,
circa 1480, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Series art
Ruth van Beek: Manual #1, Morning Ritual, 2013