By Bergotte The series has moved, so far, through poets who held clear philosophical positions: Homer’s unflinching mortality, Ovid’s philosophy of change, Dante’s architecture of love. William Shakespeare holds no clear philosophical position. He holds all of them. He is the writer who most completely refused the consolation of a settled view, who gave theContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Shakespeare”
Category Archives: Essay
The Secret History
Essay · Literature & Ideas Beauty Will Save Us, or It Will Destroy Us First Donna Tartt published The Secret History in 1991, at twenty-eight, and it arrived as something the literary culture had not quite seen before: a novel that was simultaneously a page-turner and a meditation on moral philosophy, that took seriously bothContinue reading “The Secret History”
Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There
She has been a clown, a centrefold, a society matron, a fairy-tale victim, a film noir ingénue, a Renaissance duchess, a party guest, a disaster. She has never, in fifty years of making photographs, been herself. This is not evasion. It is the most radical position in contemporary art. By Bergotte There is no portraitContinue reading “Nobody Home: Cindy Sherman and the Self That Isn’t There”
The Human Condition According to Dante
By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages andContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dante”
Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness
He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popularContinue reading “Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness”
Tove Ditlevsen
Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision thatContinue reading “Tove Ditlevsen”
Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”
I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order
A political deep dive into Trump’s reckless behaviour on the world stage — and why the consequences will outlast him Introduction Foreign policy is usually a slow-moving business. Alliances take decades to build, trade relationships are negotiated over years, and a nation’s credibility is a resource accumulated patiently across generations of diplomats, treaties, and crisesContinue reading “I’m Not a Fan of the New World Order”
The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,Continue reading “The Human Condition According to Ovid”
The Culture Now: Sudan
The world’s largest displacement crisis has scattered Sudanese artists across three continents — and, from Cairo to Nairobi to Aberdeen, they have kept working Sudan rarely leads a news cycle, which is itself part of the story. Since war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on 15 AprilContinue reading “The Culture Now: Sudan”
