Laura Kolbe
Month to Month
What we as a society prefer not to know about periods extends beyond menstruation itself to its management and the management of women’s health more broadly.
Christine Smallwood
Time Unregained
In La Captive, Chantal Akerman’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière, she offers us a Marcel unredeemed by art.
Christopher R. Browning
Fragile, Resilient Weimar
Understanding how German democracy survived the crises it faced in 1923 helps illuminate its demise ten years later.
The Void
a poem by
Ben Okri
I was talking to a builder
of bridges and asked
how he built the structure
that brings two warring elements
together. This was his answer.
What is a bridge?
A land divided, or the gap
between? Most see a unity
wrought through necessity…
Free from the Archives
One hundred years ago today, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died, aged fifty-three. In the Review’s June 8, 1995, issue, Robert Conquest assessed the life of “the man whose ideas and methods, and sheer personal willpower, so deeply distorted the flow of history.”
Robert Conquest
The Somber Monster
“There was also the sheer historical panache of a figure largely remembered as the man who had created his own party in 1903, had kept it going, with well under 10,000 members as late as 1912, and in 1917 had seized and then held power in a major empire—had ‘cast the kingdoms old/Into another mould.’… This was not how Lenin was seen while he lived, when he appeared to very many people as an alien thrown up from nowhere amid the chaotic disintegration of a barbaric society. Only to a few did he appear as a socialist revolutionary speaking the accustomed language of European Marxism. It can now be seen that these two views are not incompatible.”
