Patrick Cockburn: Survivors of the Syrian Wars

The country is now divided into three zones: Assad controls territory where about 12 million Syrians live; the Kurdish-held region has a population of a little more than two million; and the smallest zone, lying north and west of Aleppo, is a Sunni Arab bloc, also with a population of about two million, under the direct or indirect rule of Turkey. Other groups – notably IS, which once ruled a third of Syria – have been all but eliminated. But the frontiers between these zones are still fluid and all sides believe they have something to fight for.

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James Meek: NHS SOS

In the year of its seventieth anniversary, the 1.3 million people who work for the National Health Service in England find themselves in a surreal situation. They’re effectively working within two realities at once, expected simultaneously to inhabit an NHS universe where a radical, highly optimistic reform programme is under way, and a second universe in which the organisation is unmistakeably close to breakdown.

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GhITaY

James Meek: NHS SOS

In the year of its seventieth anniversary, the 1.3 million people who work for the National Health Service in England find themselves in a surreal situation. They’re effectively working within two realities at once, expected simultaneously to inhabit an NHS universe where a radical, highly optimistic reform programme is under way, and a second universe in which the organisation is unmistakeably close to breakdown.

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GetxDZ

Rosemary Hill: The Dress in Your Head

Clothes, for those who could afford to choose them freely, had always been to some extent an expression of the wearer – of their status, character and taste – but it was in the popular Modernism of the interwar years, when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society, that the particular compound of woman + clothes, Woolf’s ‘frock consciousness’, became a significant aspect of female experience, a colour on the writer’s palette, a possible agent in a narrative.

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GjQPo7

Thomas Jones: The Bomb in My Head

Before we set out, my seven-year-old daughter had asked me where her grandfather and I were going. ‘We’re going for a drive around a bomb factory,’ I said. ‘A bomb factory?’ she replied, in disbelief. And it does, or it should, beggar belief that there’s a 750-acre restricted site – or ‘centre of excellence’, as AWE’s website calls it – dedicated to the development and manufacture of the most destructive weapons ever devised, squatting in plain sight on the densely populated border of Hampshire and Berkshire.

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William Davies: Cambridge Analytica

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2E2mxnM

Anne Wagner: Neanderthal Art

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Malcolm Gaskill: On Strike

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Letters

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 7 (5 April 2018)

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2GBmgO4

Table of contents

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 7 (5 April 2018)

from London Review of Books https://ift.tt/2DZK5tC

Amia Srinivasan: Does anyone have the right to sex?

To take this question seriously requires that we recognise that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical. As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want. That way, we know, authoritarianism lies. This is true, most of all, in sex, where invocations of real or ideal desires have long been used as a cover for the rape of women and gay men. But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either.

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2peGBhk

Gaby Wood: ‘In a Lonely Place’

What does it mean for a romance to take the shape of a murder investigation? In a Lonely Place, Nicholas Ray’s elegantly bitter film about damaged trust, throws that question at its viewers. If all love stories are inquiries of one kind or another, the movie seems to suggest, perhaps they differ only in their relative violence. When filming began, Ray was married to its female lead, Gloria Grahame; by the time it ended, they were living apart. Ray said it was ‘a very personal film’ – and as parting gifts go, it was both poisonous and immortal.

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ImWo6J

Linda Colley: The Problem with Winning

Could it be that Britain’s political stability has become too pronounced? That, by not having to adjust and alter its political system as so many other countries have had to do, the UK has stored up unaddressed problems and unhelpful stagnancies? If so, might the convulsions and divisions over Brexit have some tonic effect? Might this bitterly divisive and presumably long-lasting change turn out to be the painful moderniser that military defeats and invasions have sometimes proved to be for other countries?

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2pdTUyN

Michael Wood: ‘The Shape of Water’

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2tMTEw3

Tom Crewe: Colourisation

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Eleanor Birne: At Kettle’s Yard

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2tOADcz

Letters

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 6 (22 March 2018)

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2pepaxl

Table of contents

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 6 (22 March 2018)

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2IqrKcx

Jamie Fisher: The Pursuit of a Chinese Typewriter

The problem was Qwerty, not China, where moveable type predated Gutenberg by several centuries. But the typewriter was developed for the West by the West, during a period in which China was decidedly closed off, and by the time typewriters had become a common feature of commercial life, their form was relatively fixed. At the turn of the 20th century, the missionary inventors trying for a Siamese typewriter simply lopped off two letters of the Siamese alphabet, like Cinderella’s stepsisters severing the offending toe to make the foot fit the slipper.

from London Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ozCP2S

Anne Enright: The Genesis of Blame

Impossible to keep lust out of Eden, even though it had not been invented yet. In it comes, like a snake into the garden, because the reader is one of the fallen, and cannot imagine what it is to love without transgression, or taboo. And this makes the story both clear and unimaginable, open and inaccessible.

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