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”
Category Archives: History
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”
Bret Easton Ellis
Essay · Literature & Ideas The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer andContinue reading “Bret Easton Ellis”
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”
Courtney Love
Essay · Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and whoContinue reading “Courtney Love”
The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival
She spent seventy years making art about her childhood. She became famous at seventy-one. She worked until the day she died at ninety-eight. Louise Bourgeois was not the most famous artist of the twentieth century, but she may have been the bravest — and the most honest about what art is actually for. By BergotteContinue reading “The Architecture of Fear: Louise Bourgeois and the Art of Survival”
The Culture Now: Palestine
Across Gaza, the West Bank and a scattered diaspora, the past five years have produced an unusually intense body of work — made, in large part, out of catastrophe A note on scope before anything else: “Palestinian culture” today is made across more places than any single capital could hold — Gaza, the West BankContinue reading “The Culture Now: Palestine”
Anna Karina
Essay · Film & Lives The Face That the New Wave Built Its Cathedral Around Anna Karina arrived in Paris from Copenhagen at seventeen with almost nothing, and became, within a decade, the most filmed face of the French New Wave — a presence so fully itself on screen that the camera, which usually mediatesContinue reading “Anna Karina”
The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country obsessed with images of itself. It is not enough for America to exist; it must be seen existing. It must be staged, framed, printed, reproduced, circulated, believed. From the battlefield photograph to the fashion spread, from the Depression migrant to the moonlit desert, from the civil-rights witness to theContinue reading “The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America”
My World of Interiors 