It is difficult to see criticism as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence natural: there is literature, and so—because we wish to understand and appreciate ...

When Donald Trump invoked ‘manifest destiny’ in his inaugural address, it was in its oldest meaning as territorial expansion: the predestined, God-given American right to claim and acquire new land – ...

Hermeneutics first. Nick Adams, the protagonist of Hemingway’s short story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ (1925), is about to go fishing: Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap.

The situation recalled Tom Nairn’s verdict on the Labour administration of Harold Wilson in 1965, which he said had not just ...

Moreover, he has already breached the historic firewall around the far right by using the AfD’s parliamentary backing to pass ...

The Kurdish forces, then, appear to believe that swallowing this bitter pill is the only way to preserve their social base ...

'Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in ...

The same bifurcation, however, can be found on the Left. If we look at great modern historians of the Left, we find complete indifference to the role of ideas in Fernand Braudel, contrasted with ...