It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.’ She wasn’t entirely right, but Francesca Wade’s new ‘afterlife’ of Stein takes the sentiment seriously. The revolutions in language that preoccupied Stein in life were slowly appreciated after her death in 1946. Despite having an unpromising cast of scholars, librarians, publishers and fans, Wade turns the posthumous half of the Stein story into a narrative of suppression, revelation and hopes fulfilled... read more

What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same language but were also near contemporaries. When René Descartes was born in 1596, Michel de Montaigne had only been dead for four years. Blaise Pascal, the third of them, was born in 1623, when Descartes was not even thirty and yet to make a name for himself. In 1647, Pascal and Descartes, the young scientific prodigy and the celebrated founder of modern rationalism, would meet in person, but the encounter didn’t go very well... read more

Economic forecasters have a poor reputation. J K Galbraith famously observed that their only function ‘is to make astrology look respectable’. Kenneth Rogoff gives the lie to that jibe, at least in one respect. Our Dollar, Your Problem was finished last summer, just before Donald Trump’s election. Yet Rogoff correctly identified that the future of the dollar as the global reserve currency would be one of 2025’s top questions. When a Financial Times headline asks, ‘Is the world losing faith in the almighty US dollar?’, you can be sure that something is up. Rogoff has wrestled with the dollar... read more

Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or going to one is a high-risk activity, if done properly. Trimalchio’s dinner party in The Satyricon concludes with him staging a dress rehearsal of his funeral; Edgar Allan Poe gives us the party as massacre in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. Kitty, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, compares her party nerves to ‘a young man’s feelings before a battle’, while Lucia in E F Benson’s Lucia’s Progress looks forward to the warfare:  With social blood pressure so high, with such embryos of plots and counterplots... read more

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German inventor Johannes Gutenberg. More than any man living or dead, Gutenberg had ‘created a new and wonderful earth, and along with it a new hell’, Twain wrote. ‘Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it.’  Call me soft, but it seems unfair to pin all the horrors and glories of modernity on one man, however broad his shoulders, however remarkable his creation. The question of what, exactly, Gutenberg ... read more

The opening pages of Edward St Aubyn’s new novel – his eleventh – may surprise readers familiar only with his highly successful Patrick Melrose series. That five-novel saga depicted the author’s well-born, horrifically damaged alter ego, and was written in a clipped and clinical style, a very mildly modernised version of Evelyn Waugh’s or Anthony Powell’s icy observational mode. Parallel Lines kicks off with what sounds more like Beat poetry. ‘Cows needed three or four stomachs to rip apart the tough fabric of the universe,’ reflects Sebastian, gazing out of the window at bucolic surroundings. ‘To break down the cellulites,’ he muses, ‘or cellophane, or cell mates, there was a word ... read more