DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
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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
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
Re-releases from Iain Matthews, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Charlie Daniels Band
JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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.
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