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Fintan O’Toole
The Ultimate Deal

Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated.

Gary Saul Morson
Death and the Hedgehog

With his conversion to his own highly distinct form of Christianity, Tolstoy made a religion of universal love, forsaking violence, laws, private property, and high culture.

David A. Bell
Ego-Histories

The more that historians make their own experiences an explicit part of their work, the harder it will become to let the sources speak clearly.

Liza Batkin
She Said, She Said

Suzie Miller’s one-woman play, starring Jodie Comer, shows that survivors of sexual assault are too often disbelieved in court but offers a worrying solution.

June 12, 2020

a poem by
Shane McCrae

Rattlesnakes fill the lawn one rattlesnake
A baby rattlesnake I’m almost ten
Years old because in two months
I’ll be nine
Summer has stuffed the willow’s dark
Hair full that flashes white in gusts
with hair…

Free from the Archives

The Victorian photographer (and great aunt to Virginia Woolf) Julia Margaret Cameron was born 208 years ago today. In the Review’s February 4, 1999, issue, Janet Malcolm wrote about Cameron’s life and art, arguing that “her reputation as a major photographer is inextricably entangled with the legend of her endearing ridiculousness.” A generous, energetic, well-to-do eccentric and mother of six, Cameron converted an old chicken house into a studio, where she photographed some of the most prominent men of Victorian England—among others, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—as well as a series of what she called “fancy-subject” pictures, group portraits in which costumed sitters enacted Biblical and mythological scenes for her camera. “What gives Cameron’s pictures of actors their special quality—their status as treasures of photography of an unfathomably peculiar sort,” wrote Malcolm, “is their singular combination of amateurism and artistry.”

Janet Malcolm
The Genius of the Glass House

“One of Cameron’s most potent spells was the soft focus into which…she consistently cast her images. One has only to imagine her fancy-subject pictures as taken by Richard Avedon’s or Annie Leibovitz’s pitilessly sharp lenses to understand the role soft focus plays in the sense these pictures give of being traces of impossible dreams, rather than mere laughable attempts to fool the eye.”