Panoramic survey of US foreign policy as Washington attempts to maintain its global hegemony in conditions of faltering growth. Containing China, confronting Russia, driving decarbonization: each of Biden’s stated aims has been beset by insoluble contradictions from the outset, Richard Beck argues, now compounded by Israel’s punitive war on Gaza.
Interview with a prominent leader of the German left on the state of her country, currently the epicentre of converging crises—geopolitical, economic, environmental. With politics swerving right under an SPD-led government, flux and refoundation on the left.
A decade ago, Christopher Clark upended conventional accounts of the origins of the First World War; he has now rewritten the history of the European revolutions of 1848–1849, and proposed a new way of considering their outcomes. Analytically, what differentiates and what connects these two outstanding achievements?
Above the fray of mediatized controversy, a classicist situates the heritage of the ‘West’ in the long view. A culture forged by the interplay of ecclesiastical, capitalist and emancipatory forces; the catastrophes of European world conquest and their weight on the present. Does Benjamin offer a way through the impasse?
Oliver Eagleton on Will Hutton, This Time No Mistakes. Lessons for the incoming Labour government on humanizing British capitalism, from a proselytizer of Blair’s Third Way.
Lola Seaton on Anne Carson, Wrong Norma. Multi-form collection from one of the most erudite and ludic contemporary poets.
Joy Neumeyer on Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers and Russia’s War. Twin studies, scholarly and less so, of the uses of the past in Putin’s war for Ukraine.
