GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
Latest editorial
Visionary guides in times of violence
What better guide for our times, say FIONA O’CONNOR than the example of remarkable women who thought through the experience of WWII
HORROR IN GAZA: Palestinians pray over a mass grave, in Khan Younis, of the bodies of their dead brought from Shifa hospital last Wednesday. Hannah Arendt foresaw these outcomes and was furious at the Zionist movement’s 1942 resolutions to model an ethnically homogeneous Jewish nation-state in Israel
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy
Wolfram Eilenberger, Allen Lane, £25
COMING in this time of war The Visionaries offers insights into the human capacity to think through violence.
Remarkable women caught up in the second world war totalitarian machine: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are Jewish women fleeing the Gestapo; French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is trapped in Vichy France. These women’s experiences are captured in this group biography along with radical ideas that shaped a century, born from painful comprehension of human atrocity.
And somehow (bestseller) Ayn Rand gets in the mix; a Russian-Jewish refugee from Stalinism, her writing is shamefully exposed for its inadequacy when read next to the others.
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a biography of the Marxist intellectual and author, made from the point of view of his son
JOHN GREEN applauds an excellent and accessible demonstration that the capitalist economy is the biggest threat to our existence
FIONA O'CONNOR recommends a biography that is a beautiful achievement and could stand as a manifesto for the power of subtlety in art
FIONA O’CONNOR is fascinated by a novel written from the perspective of a neurodivergent psychology student who falls in love