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Our October 19 issue is online now, with Gary Younge on the Black soldiers who fought for freedom at home and abroad, David Shulman on the road to a second Nakba, Jenny Uglow on the exuberant Gwen John, Suzy Hansen on America’s endless and remote wars, Kim Phillips-Fein on plundering private equity, Natalie Angier on milk, Megan O’Grady on Lucy Lippard, Adam Kirsch on the prophetic Kieślowski, Philip Clark on the lines Chuck Berry crossed, Susan Neiman on Germany’s historical memory, poems by Arthur Sze, Jessica Laser, and Jules Laforgue, and much more.

Kim Phillips-Fein
Conspicuous Destruction

Two new books argue that the private equity industry has created an economic order in which getting rich quickly preempts every other value, undermining companies and evading the law.

Natalie Angier
Not Milk?

A new book shows how cow’s milk attained the status of kitchen essential and universal beverage in the United States. But its consumption has been in decline for decades—a trend that nothing seems capable of stopping.

Jenny Uglow
‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

David Motadel
Is Prussian Militarism a Myth?

Peter Wilson’s Iron and Blood is a bold survey of over half a millennium of German military history.

Adam Kirsch
Intolerable Freedoms

The Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy darkly anticipated some of the central conflicts of the post–cold war period.

Free from the Archives

1. H. Auden died fifty years ago tomorrow, in Vienna. The following month Stephen Spender gave a memorial address at Oxford—published in the Review’s November 29, 1973, issue—extolling his friend’s wit, his “serious but at the time savingly comic” eccentricities, “his total lack of self-pity,” his “not altogether quite un-chic” youthful fashions, his older “face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines,” and, above all, the gratitude that Spender felt for Auden’s life.

Stephen Spender
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

“A voice, really, in which he could insulate any two words so that they seemed separate from the rest of the created universe, and sent a freezing joking thrill down one’s spine.”

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