Summer 18 Issue

When Isaiah Berlin left Oxford in July 1940 he was single – “inépousable” according to his future mother-in-law – a relatively unknown philosophy don, prone to dark moods. While…
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In a review of Sheila Heti’s recently published novel Motherhood for The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz took a moment to consider the ways in which writing is “threatened” by…
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This essay began in 2002 when we were in Thessaloniki for a conference at the Aristotle University on the cultural history of the body. Hesse’s mother, a child of the region’s…
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My father, Curt David Bloch, was a smartass. But that wasn’t the reason he lost his first job when he was 25 years old. He was fired in 1933 when, overnight, it became illegal for…
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I am sitting in the chair reading, and hear a group of people talking on the street. A woman enquires whether anything is known about the family living at number 30. “They were…
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Since the first slices of Portnoy’s Complaint  appeared in the 1967 issue of "New American Review" – I was then an Orthodox teenager searching for escape - but later, too, even in…
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Jon Lansman, Momentum founder and a newly elected member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, and D.D. Guttenplan, JQ editor, began talking politics when they first…
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We’ve surpassed ourselves this time,” said London mayor Sadiq Khan at the unveiling of the latest sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square earlier this year. And it’s…
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