By Bergotte New Order made the most unlikely record in the history of popular music. Three people whose previous band had defined the outer limits of post-industrial English despair, whose singer had hanged himself eight months before the recording sessions began, whose entire artistic identity had been built on darkness and weight and the refusalContinue reading “What’s So Special About New Order”
Category Archives: History
The Shadow and the Sun: Who We Are According to Plato
He was the most gifted prose writer in the history of philosophy and the most dangerous thinker in the Western tradition. He gave us the Forms, the cave, the immortal soul, the philosopher-king, and the suspicion — never quite extinguished in the two and a half thousand years since — that the world we seeContinue reading “The Shadow and the Sun: Who We Are According to Plato”
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Encounters · No. 9 Everyone, All at Once Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted crowds, seasons, proverbs, and catastrophes. He was the first painter to look at ordinary people and decide that their lives were the whole subject. Five centuries later, no one has done it better. By Bergotte In the lower right corner of aContinue reading “Pieter Bruegel the Elder”
Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris
Sacré-Cœur occupies an unusual place in the imagination of Paris. Its white domes are immediately recognisable, yet the familiarity of the silhouette can obscure the complexity of the building beneath it. Above Montmartre’s streets, the basilica brings together religious devotion, nineteenth-century political conflict and an architecture designed to make belief visible across a city. ItsContinue reading “Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris”
The Reel Argument: Yasujirō Ozu
By Bergotte Yasujirō Ozu made films about the same thing for forty years — the Japanese family, its dissolution, the grief of parents watching children leave, the quiet devastation of time — and he made them with a formal consistency so extreme that critics spent decades arguing about whether it was a limitation or anContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Yasujirō Ozu”
Anne Carson: The Intelligence of Desire
The 2026 Nobel laureate has brought classical scholarship, poetry and the essay into a sustained inquiry into desire, grief and the limits of knowledge. Her achievement changes how we understand the relationship between intellectual life and emotional experience. The award of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson, announced on 8 October, recognisesContinue reading “Anne Carson: The Intelligence of Desire”
The Human Condition According to Walt Whitman
By Bergotte Walt Whitman’s answer to the human condition is the most audacious in all of literature: yes. Not the qualified yes of the philosopher who has weighed the evidence, not the fragile yes of the survivor who has come through suffering and found something on the other side, but the absolute, prior, unconditional yesContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Walt Whitman”
Building With the Village
Makers & Rooms — Essay IX Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in a village in Burkina Faso with no electricity and no school. He went to Berlin on a scholarship, became an architect, and came back to build one. What he discovered in that act — about materials, about community, about what architecture is actuallyContinue reading “Building With the Village”
What’s So Special About Joy Division
By Bergotte Joy Division made two studio albums and a handful of singles between 1978 and 1980, and their singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen in Macclesfield on the eve of the band’s first American tour, at the age of twenty-three. It would be easy — it has been easy, for forty yearsContinue reading “What’s So Special About Joy Division”
The 90s at Tate Britain: Art, Fashion and the Politics of Belonging
The 1990s have become unusually easy to recognise and increasingly difficult to remember in their complexity. Kate Moss, a slip dress, a warehouse party, a shark suspended in formaldehyde: the decade survives through images whose familiarity can conceal the circumstances that produced them. Tate Britain’s new exhibition, The 90s: Art and Fashion, brings this visualContinue reading “The 90s at Tate Britain: Art, Fashion and the Politics of Belonging”
