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‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin Alex Halberstadt elicits some painful memories from his reluctant grandfather, once Stalin’s bodyguard Matthew Janney The Spectator From magazine issue: 1 August 2020 Anyone close to Stalin lived under sentence of death. Credit: Alamy Text settings Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning Alex Halberstadt Jonath..

In Search of Shakespeare’s Mind By Daniel Blank LARB JULY 28, 2020 IN ONE OF Borges’s final short stories, a Shakespearean scholar named Hermann Sörgel is offered an unusual possession at a conference in London. The object, which also gives the story its title, is Shakespeare’s memory, a collection of the playwright’s own remembrances “from his youngest boyhood days to early April, 1616.” Sörgel..

Class & Inequality The Keynesian Revolution A new biography reveals the full scope of John Maynard Keynes’s critique of unfettered capitalism, emphasizing the economist’s larger philosophical vision of the good life Jonathan Kirshner Boston Review Jul 13, 2020 John Maynard Keynes (center) with philosopher Bertrand Russell (left) and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey (right). Image: PBS The..

학술출판의 위기, 방치해도 좋은가 백원근 서평위원/책과사회연구소 대표·출판평론가 대학지성 2020.07.05 18:00 [리베르타스] 코로나19로 인해 사회의 모든 부분이 타격을 받고 있다. 대학 역시 대부분의 학교가 비대면 온라인 강의를 진행하면서 수업 만족도에 대한 문제부터 등록금 반환 논란에 이르기까지 바람 잘 날이 없다. 지난 한 학기 내내 대학의 정체성이나 교육 방식을 둘러싼 고민은 물론이고 대학의 내일을 걱정하는 이들이 적지 않았다. 그래서 학사 일정상으로는 여름방학이지만 예전처럼 느긋한 하계 휴식이 되기는 어려울 것 같다. 코로나19와 함께 성찰의 시간은 길어질 전망이다. 코로나19 상황에서 대학 교재 등을 펴내는 학술출판의 위기는 더욱 깊어졌다. 책은 물성이 있는 매체이지만 개인적으로 읽는..

Michelangelo, He Made Stone Speak God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece Ingrid D. Rowland The New York Review of Books July 2, 2020 Issue Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece by William E. Wallace Princeton University Press, 277 pp., $29.95 Elliott Erwitt/Magnum PhotosSt. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, 1993 If Mich..

Food & drink But is it food? The world of cheap produce and its consequences By bee wilson TLS June 26, 2020 “Rabbits O! – Rabbits”, nineteenth-century engraving|© Bridgeman Images THE SOCIAL COST OF CHEAP FOOD Labour and the political economy of food distribution in Britain 1830–1914 240pp. McGill-Queen’s University Press. £27.99. Sébastien Rioux FEEDING BRITAIN Our food problems and how to fix..

Spuds with everything Potatoes were hyped as the key to a well-nourished populace by the European intelligentsia in the 1700s Books By Oliver Wiseman The Critic, July/August 2020 Before Jamie Oliver there was Henry Fielding. Like the Naked Chef, the Tom Jones author was worried about the diets of England’s children. There may not have been turkey twizzlers in the eighteenth century but there wer..

Just Use Your Thinking Pump! Jessica Riskin The New York Review of Books, July 2, 2020 Issue The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey by Henry M. Cowles Harvard University Press, 372 pp., $35.00 A few years ago, when my daughter was in middle school, she had to study for a quiz on “the five steps of the scientific method.” She had no problem memorizing five words in a..

The Correctors Meet the editors of early modern book publishing. By Anthony Grafton Lapham's Quarterly Wednesday, June 10, 2020 Illustration from the “Schwazer Bergbuch,” 1556. Wikimedia Commons. Specters haunt the history of publishing and of humanistic scholarship in early modern Europe: lean, shabby ghosts. Correctors, as they were usually called, prepared manuscripts for the press, read proo..

Humankind by Rutger Bregman review – why we are all deep-down decent From peacenik hunter-gatherers to helpful toddlers … a ‘hopeful history’ argues that the underlying nature of human beings is not savage but essentially nice Steven Poole The Guardian Wed 10 Jun 2020 A chapter on Easter Island attempts to disprove the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and populat..