Dr Joseph Brooker on Eimear McBride in conversation with Jacqueline Rose On 25th January 2017 the acclaimed novelist Eimear McBride came to Birkbeck for a public conversation with Professor Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. One of the college’s largest lecture
Dr Anna Hartnell on the Inauguration of Donald Trump Donald Trump’s inaugural address was always going to be ugly. His campaign speeches may have been successful at rallying crowds, but he is no great orator, and a bit of poison and malice is standard fare.
Joseph Brooker on Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line at the British Library The British Library currently displays a large selection of maps from the 20th century. The maps are sorted into the themes: Mapping a New World (a general section, with emphasis on
Martin Eve on Nice Fish at the Harold Pinter Theatre The reviews were mixed and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Two men sitting on a sheet of ice, fishing and talking. For that is the plot of Nice Fish almost in its entirety, which
Professor Martin Eve on The Man Who Knew Infinity On a flight to Kansas this week, where I was participating in a scholarly communications symposium, I watched The Man Who Knew Infinity (2016); a dramatisation of the life of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan as
Dr Isabel Davis on the Waitrose Christmas ad and #StopFundingHate This year’s Christmas advert from Waitrose is a moving tale of the Scandinavian robin’s dangerous migration. Set to a swelling orchestral soundtrack, it tells the story of a girl waiting for the robin to return
Dr Peter Fifield on Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March. Trans. Michael Hofmann. London: Granta, 2002. Alongside that of Stefan Zweig, the English publication of Joseph Roth’s writings during the past couple of decades has marked the belated arrival in Britain of two distinctive, Jewish voices speaking of
Joseph Brooker on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Every year the Nobel Prize for Literature generates speculation, lobbying and betting. Some names come up repeatedly. This time Haruki Murakami was said to be surging, before shares in Don DeLillo rose sharply. I saw someone remark online
Martin Eve & Peter Fifield on “No’s Knife” at the Old Vic Martin Eve: When I booked to see No’s Knife at the Old Vic – an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing devised and performed by Lisa Dwan – I did kind of know what I
Martin Eve on William Gaddis’s JR I am currently re-reading William Gaddis‘s monstrous 1975 novel, JR. While this is a book that defies easy plot summary, one of the central strands of the text concerns the eponymous eleven-year-old schoolboy, J. R. Vansant, and his adept manipulation