They had no pulpit, no vote, no university, no legal standing, and no legitimate path to public authority in any institution their world recognised. So they found the one loophole the medieval Church could not easily close — the direct line to God — and they used it to address popes, command armies, reshape theology,Continue reading “Speaking for God: How Medieval Women Seized Power Through Divine Voice”
Category Archives: Blog
Ian Fleming’s Bond
Essay · Literature & Culture The Man Who Cannot Be Killed James Bond was created in 1952 by a bored, unhappy, recently married former intelligence officer writing his first novel in a Jamaican house he had built to escape from England, and he has refused to die for seventy years. The refusal is the mostContinue reading “Ian Fleming’s Bond”
Georges-Eugène Haussmann
Essay · Architecture & History The Man Who Demolished Paris to Save It Georges-Eugène Haussmann did not build Paris. He destroyed it, systematically and at enormous speed and with the full authority of an emperor behind him, and what he built in its place was something that had not previously existed: the modern city, withContinue reading “Georges-Eugène Haussmann”
Arthur Jafa
Essay · Art & Ideas The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, aContinue reading “Arthur Jafa”
The Human Condition According to Shakespeare
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”
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”
The Beatles
Essay · Music & Ideas Four Men and the Thing They Were Saying The Beatles did not set out to have a message. They set out to make girls scream, to get out of Liverpool, to be bigger than Elvis, and they achieved all three with a speed and a completeness that left them, byContinue reading “The Beatles”
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”
Carrie Fisher
Essay · Literature & Lives The Princess Who Wrote Her Way Out Carrie Fisher was a movie star who became a writer, which is the reverse of the usual trajectory and considerably the more interesting one. The writing she produced — the novels, the memoirs, the one-woman shows, the screenplay work, the wit deployed inContinue reading “Carrie Fisher”
Debbie Reynolds
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Outlasted Everything Debbie Reynolds was not the most critically celebrated actress of her generation, nor the most artistically adventurous, nor the one the serious film culture tended to reach for when it needed an example of Hollywood at its best. She was something rarer and in someContinue reading “Debbie Reynolds”
