Berfrois

January 2015

Andre Gerard: To the War

Andre Gerard: To the War

“The Horror! The Horror!” By gentle degrees, by looking at names and intertextual references to Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, Howards End and The Odyssey, I want to make To the Lighthouse new again.

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Supreme Law

Supreme Law

“I crave the law”: the phrase has always struck me for its surprising vulnerability and emotional urgency. We Americans -- we white Americans are used to thinking of the law much as Portia does: a dispassionate system that disregards personal attachments.

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As China has embraced a type of capitalism, original editions of the Little Red Book have become a scarce commodity…

As China has embraced a type of capitalism, original editions of the Little Red Book have become a scarce commodity…

In West Germany in the late 1960s, the Little Red Book “resembled simultaneously an accessory of the classical workers’ movement and a modish commodity of the educated elite”.

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Murdoch’s Magnified Eccentricity

Murdoch’s Magnified Eccentricity

There are signs that Murdoch’s attention is flagging, and what might be politely called his increasing eccentricity is magnified by his addiction to Twitter.

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Encounters

Encounters

Racism persists, especially in its more invisible and subtle forms. Terms including modern racism, symbolic racism, and aversive racism, emphasize forms of racial discrimination that are “more likely than ever to be disguised and covert,” in contrast to the more popularly recognized “old-fashioned” varieties of racism characterized by “overt...

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Can fiction compete with history?

Can fiction compete with history?

In the autumn of 1967, the novelists Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa were drinking in a London pub. The conversation paused on Edmund Wilson’s book of portraits from the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore, and then, Fuentes recalled, they had a moment of inspiration – why not...

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