References to matter, material world and materiality take us to the threshold of the various doctrines known as materialism. I want to start by discriminating some of the relevant meanings and ...

‘To declare an event is to become the son of that event’, wrote Alain Badiou in his Saint Paul. Crashed is such a declaration. Rich in illuminating detail, Adam Tooze’s book offers the most extensive ...

‘This book is about how the global financial system works, and in whose interests’, Tony Norfield announces at the start of The City. He also sets out to explain the functions of the Square Mile for ...

‘For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we ...

But Live Here? No Thanks at Munich’s Lenbachhaus is a stirring retrospective of Surrealism, which places anti-fascism at its core. Marking the centenary of Breton’s first manifesto, the exhibition ...

In his 1973 essay on the painter Jacques Monory, Jean-François Lyotard makes significant use of the following tale from Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings: In one of the volumes of the Lettres ...

There has been a vicious war of words between Congo’s president Felix Tshisekedi and the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame – ...

Most of the Paris arcades came into being during the decade and a half which followed 1822. The first condition for their emergence was the boom in the textile trade. The magasins de nouveauté, the ...

Norbert Wiener, in the early 1960s, foresaw a parallel between the process of automation and the nature of magic as it has been depicted in countless fantasies, from Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s ...

‘Japan is not interesting’: thus the literary scholar Masao Miyoshi could, with a twist of irony, entitle an essay on his native country a decade and a half ago. The dramas that have since beset Japan ...