Erica Wagner

1 week ago | telegraph.co.uk | Erica Wagner

But it's more than the zeitgeist of course: it's the story of America. Frey and I discuss the centenary of The Great Gatsby, another novel about "extraordinary wealth and lawlessness", as he puts it. I'm making a link to Fitzgerald's world; Frey, never one for modesty, is ready for straight comparison. "Fitzgerald held up a mirror to the society he lived in, and I hold up a mirror to mine, and they're not different.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Erica Wagner

Gethan Dick’s dystopia begins at Elephant and Castle in London. The narrator, a young woman who considers herself unexceptional, recalls a break in a water main at the big roundabout, a rupture that revealed “white quartz pebbles being washed clean, rattling as they went like in any stream bed”. The surfaces we have built on the face of the Earth to sustain us are just that, only surfaces, easily cracked open to show what’s roiling beneath.

1 month ago | newstatesman.com | Erica Wagner

What makes a person who they are? This is the greatest and simplest mystery of all our lives; it is a ceaseless puzzle, tormenting, and intriguing, one that we’ll never solve for ourselves, nor for those closest to us. But for those we’ll never meet, there is biography, that form that purports to offer a method by which to puzzle out motive and character, to reveal the soul of the subject.

1 month ago | observer.co.uk | Erica Wagner

These days, standing ovations in London’s West End seem obligatory. I resist, because surely this theatrical accolade should be reserved for the greatest performances. But I rose to my feet for John Lithgow on the opening night of Giant, Mark Rosenblatt’s play about Roald Dahl and antisemitism, which has transferred from the Royal Court. It is too simplistic to say that the play paints Dahl as a monster.

Mar 18, 2025 | newstatesman.com | Erica Wagner

An undersea fibre optic cable between Latvia and Sweden, damaged at the end of January – Sweden suspects Russian foul play.  Earlier that month, a fleet of Nato vessels assembles off the coast of Estonia to guard undersea cables from sabotage. In the UK, MPs and Lords are due to investigate the vulnerabilities of undersea cables, thanks to an inquiry initiated by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy.