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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Henry Hitchings |Ian Sansom |Francesca Peacock
In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Octavia Sheepshanks |Ben Domenech |Francesca Peacock |Jonathan Sumption
A friend recently found himself trapped on a plane next to a young woman reading a Kindle bedecked with stickers of dragons and pointy-eared, hunky men. The font size was so large it was impossible not to see the sexually explicit text. He observed, “I was reading The Lord of the Rings; her book was more along the lines of I’m the Lord of Your Ring. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.”Welcome to the cultural phenomenon of romantasy — a newly mainstreamed trend fueled by TikTok, or rather BookTok.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Henry Hitchings |Edward Howell |Francesca Peacock |Jonathan Sumption
For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid “salaryman” business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight — but only for a while.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
spectator.co.uk | Francesca Peacock
Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’. The book that produced such praise – Italo Calvino called it ‘a...
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
spectator.com.au | Francesca Peacock
Lies and Sorcery Penguin Classics/NYRB Books, pp.775, 18.99 In 1948, Natalia Ginzburg, then an editor at the Italian publishing house Einaudi, received an 800-page brick of a manuscript from an acquaintance, Elsa Morante. Ginzburg read it in one sitting and declared Morante was going to be ‘the greatest writer of the century’. More recently, Elena Ferrante credited Morante with showing her ‘what literature can be’.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Paul Keegan |Matt Ridley |Jonathan Miller |Francesca Peacock
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in the early 1940s, he pointed across the room at André Breton and said: “That is surrealism.” Even today it can seem as if no other answer is available, so tenacious was his grip.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Francesca Peacock
Gliff Hamish Hamilton, pp.274, 8.99 ‘Gliff’ is a word which can mean ‘a short moment’, ‘a wallop’, and ‘a post-ejaculatory sex act’; to ‘dispel snow’, ‘to frighten’, and to ‘escape something quickly’. It’s ‘really excitingly polysemous’, says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Francesca Peacock
‘Gliff’ is a word which can mean ‘a short moment’, ‘a wallop’, and ‘a post-ejaculatory sex act’; to ‘dispel snow’, ‘to frighten’, and to ‘escape something quickly’. It’s ‘really excitingly polysemous’, says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its centre are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her.
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Oct 26, 2024 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Francesca Peacock
Andrew Jotischky’s new book is a history of monastic life from early Christianity Credit: Alamy In seventh-century Emesa, Syria, a man walked through town tugging a dead dog on the end of a rope. He defecated in public, strode about naked with all his clothes piled in a turban on his head and tried to force his way into the women’s section of the bath-house. Despite all appearances, this man was a monk, “Symeon the Holy Fool”. His hijinks were part of a Byzantine monastic life called salos,...
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Francesca Peacock |Medieval Royal Women
Credit: Battel Hall Retable © Leeds Castle Foundation 18 In the popular imagination, “medieval” and “women” aren’t always words which go together happily. Ideas about the lives of pre-Renaissance women tend to form two hazy stereotypes: an illiterate girl who was married young, and had to endure the horrors of pregnancy, childbirth, and a hateful repressive husband all before she was out of her teens; or her cloistered sister, a Nun, who lived a life of ascetic boredom and deprivation. In a...
