Who Gets to Be a Monster? Book: Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying WomenAuthor: Eleanor JohnsonPublisher: Princeton University PressPublication: 6 October 2026Pages: 344ISBN: 9780691291666Genre: Cultural history / Feminist criticism / Mythology There are monsters, and then there are women who have been made monstrous. The distinction lies at the heart of Eleanor Johnson’s wonderfully provocativeContinue reading “Monstrous Bitch”
Category Archives: Blog
How Proust Can Change Your Life
How Proust Can Change Your Life In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask whatContinue reading “How Proust Can Change Your Life”
The Human Condition According to Mark Twain
By Bergotte Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy —Continue reading “The Human Condition According to Mark Twain”
Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor
How a boy from Northern Ireland transformed Loewe, dismantled the boundaries between fashion and culture, and arrived at Dior with more creative power than any designer since Christian Dior himself By Bergotte Fashion periodically decides that one designer matters more than everybody else. The reasons are never entirely aesthetic. A designer becomes important because heContinue reading “Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor”
Alessi
Makers & Rooms — Essay VI The Dream Factory on the Lake For a century, the Alessi family has been making things for the kitchen and the table. Alberto Alessi turned that inheritance into something stranger and more ambitious: a theory of what objects are for, a laboratory for the most original design minds ofContinue reading “Alessi”
What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She respondedContinue reading “What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba”
The Post-Compliance Generation
I think about this a lot… by Bergotte What Gen Z Gets Right There is an ungenerous and emotionally immature kind of pleasure available to every ageing generation: the discovery that the young are doing everything incorrectly. Their clothes are wrong, their language is absurd, their music is noise, their manners have deteriorated and theirContinue reading “The Post-Compliance Generation”
Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X
Taste, Technology and What Happened to the Individual Eye I think About This A Lot… by Birgitte Hahn-Etc There comes a point in middle age when one catches oneself looking at a group of twenty-somethings and thinking something one had promised never to think: Why are they all dressed like that? This is treacherous territory.Continue reading “Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X”
Condemned to Be Free: Who We Are According to Jean-Paul Sartre
Every philosopher in this series has made demands. Kierkegaard demanded genuine decision. Beauvoir demanded resistance to structural power. Nietzsche demanded value-creation in the void. Heidegger demanded ownership of one’s own being. Sartre takes all of these demands, strips away every remaining support, and arrives at the most terrifying and the most liberating position in theContinue reading “Condemned to Be Free: Who We Are According to Jean-Paul Sartre”
Asger Jorn
Encounters · No. 7 The Vandal with a Vision Asger Jorn bought other people’s paintings at flea markets and painted over them. He helped invent two of the twentieth century’s most radical movements and then walked away from both. He believed that art was not a product but a way of being alive. He wasContinue reading “Asger Jorn”
