First in a two-part global reappraisal of the linkages between technological advance and capitalist labour-market dysfunction. What light does automation discourse shed on dynamics within the productive economy? Rise of the robots versus industrial overcapacity to explain the worsening crisis of under-employment.

The testing of opposing ideas and perils of descent into arbitrary power: Kafka’s schooling in the principe du contradictoire as explainer of his prose style and preoccupations, in The Trial and beyond.

Building on the extended review by Cédric Durand in NLR 116/117, Perry Anderson seeks clues to the politics and method behind Adam Tooze’s Crashed in the author’s wider oeuvre. From the Peace of 1919 to the dollar swap-lines of 2008, the oft-heralded rise of a beneficent American hegemon.

Twice consumed by fire and set to be rebuilt anew, in what sense can Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art still be said to exist? Freudian derealization, Cartesian doubt and Gaelic allegory summoned by a resident scholar’s memories of reconstructed timbers and their smouldering remains.

In response to the recent debate between Francis Mulhern and Joseph North on the means and purposes of literary criticism, Lola Seaton examines the play of method and personal experience in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City and its contemporary rebound in the ‘hauntology’ of K-Punk’s Mark Fisher.