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Today in The New York Review of Books: Lynn Hunt mulls the fate of Marat; Samuel Earle revisits Walter Lippmann’s decades of journalism; Larry Wolff watches a new production of Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera; a poem by Emily Berry; and, from the archives, Adam Hochschild on color photographs of World War I.

Lynn Hunt
Counting Heads

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination transformed the reviled mouthpiece of revolutionary bloodthirstiness into the revered martyr of the people’s cause.

Samuel Earle
The Sage of Washington

Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.

Larry Wolff
Opera in Ragged Times

Scott Joplin’s luminous musical parable on the evils of ignorance is uncannily attuned to the present moment.

Living

a poem by
Emily Berry

It was hard for us, the way you died
every day, slowly and then all at once,
just as such things are said to happen.
Spring came, so soon it almost seemed
you could’ve waited, but I know, I know,
you couldn’t wait. My head was full of names
of flowers, and I kept picking stones…

Free from the Archives

The first color photograph—as distinct from hand-tinted monochrome photographs—was produced 165 years ago today. The English inventor Thomas Sutton’s image of a tartan ribbon was made using a pioneering three-color process, but due to the expense and difficulty of early technologies, color photography did not become the predominant medium for another hundred years.

On September 5, 2014, Adam Hochschild wrote about the “startling” experience of seeing color photographs of World War I, only a few thousand of which are known to exist: “It feels like looking at a familiar scene through a different pair of eyeglasses, one that allows you to see all sorts of things…that are hard to imagine even now from the many TV documentaries marking the war’s centennial.”

Adam Hochschild
Into the Trenches in Red and Blue

The first thing that stuns you is the brilliant colors of the uniforms. Most of the photos in this book are from France, and the French army of 1914 was the most snappily dressed in Europe. French infantrymen wore bright red trousers, bright blue coats, and bright red caps. And these were combat uniforms, not just dress uniforms. When, at a parliamentary hearing two years before the war, a reformer had suggested doing away at least with the red trousers, the minister of war shouted him down: “Jamais! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!”

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