Innholdsfortegnelse for December 18, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960 a retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland, August 6–16, 2025. Catalog of the retrospective edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht. Montreuil: Éditions de l’Œil, 254 pp., €30.00 There was a period, in the decade after World War II, when British films achieved without fanfare a broad viewership among Americans. This was true especially for those young enough to be at home watching daytime television. At a time when Hollywood studios hesitated to license their productions to the rival medium, local stations found it convenient to fill stretches of the afternoon and late-night hours with a wide range of British features in frequent rotation: Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Man in the White Suit (1951), Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford in…

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks. New York Review Books, 232 pp., $18.95 (paper) The Correction of Taste: On the Late Novels of Henry James by Denis Donoghue, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín. Dublin: Lilliput, 282 pp., $22.00 In a book-length study of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1879, Henry James quoted his admired predecessor bemoaning the difficulty of writing a “romance”—that is, a novel—set in America, his “dear native land,” since it has “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” Other American writers of the time would likely have raised a strong objection to Hawthorne’s deprecation of the country of his birth. James, however,…

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead, 248 pp., $29.00 The fun starts with the title. Will There Ever Be Another You is a quotation from the cover of Time magazine, March 10, 1997, a framed copy of which Patricia Lockwood’s protagonist, a writer also named Patricia Lockwood, is shown by a vendor in an antique mall during the pandemic: “Will There Ever Be Another You? A Special Report on Cloning.” The Time cover image is a duplicated photo of Dolly, the Finn Dorset ewe born in Scotland eight months earlier, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell. Repeating the question, Lockwood removes the question mark, thereby suggesting that her book contains the answer. Her own subtitle, had she provided one, might have…

“It’s the outsiders, after all, who do things. Who discovered the North Pole? Not the Esquimaux, but an outsider. Who are trying to climb Mt. Everest, the highest peak in the world? Not the natives of the Himalayas, but outsiders. And I’m willing to bet that an auto expedition across the Sahara would add more to the world’s knowledge than all the contributions by Arabs since the world began.” “It may be, it may be, Frank,” admitted the professor. —Victor Appleton (aka John W. Duffield), Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery (1925) Despite his apparent ignorance of the origins of algebra and astrolabes, the professor is, we are told, a famous scientist whose chief pursuit is researching “the relics of dead civilizations.” He joins his big-game-hunting brother Frank and…

One of the best things about Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens—a remarkably successful collaboration between the Dutch horticultural designer Piet Oudolf and the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron that opened to the public in September—is that amid the contoured earth mounds and dense flower beds that surround and surmount the subterranean museum there are no works by the man for whom it is named. Only as you come close to the entrance of this jewellike, nearly invisible structure are you confronted with Alexander Calder’s The Cock’s Comb (1960), a spiky, black-painted sheet metal stabile (a word coined by Jean Arp to parallel his friend’s more famous free-hanging mobiles, a term devised by another Calder intimate, Marcel Duchamp). You then descend into Herzog & de Meuron’s intriguing sequence of underground galleries…

The West: The History of an Idea by Georgios Varouxakis. Princeton University Press, 491 pp., $39.95 “The West” owes its existence to Russia. By the late eighteenth century, Latin Christendom had become “Europe.” Europe, since Peter the Great, extended to St. Petersburg, but most Europeans did not think of Russia as a peer. “The West,” according to Georgios Varouxakis’s “history of an idea,” proved a suitable solution. After the Roman Empire and the Christian church split into “Western” and “Eastern” halves, the terms were occasionally used as political and ecclesiastic shorthand but not as collective labels. Byzantines called themselves “Romans,” were known to most outsiders as “Greeks,” and called Roman Catholics “Latins” and sometimes “Franks.” Western Christians did not mind being Latins and sometimes Franks but were less certain about…

Oasis: Live ’25 a concert at Wembley Stadium, London, July 25, 2025, and at other venues in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and South America Live Forever: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Oasis by John Robb. HarperNorth, 424 pp., $30.00 And After All: A Fan History of Oasis by Melissa Locker. Gallery, 304 pp., $30.00 The biggest rock bands not only make the best noise but talk the most nonsense, a fact that should be protected, if facts can be protected nowadays, by anyone interested in keeping rock and roll alive. Oasis was born loquacious, and its leading members, Liam and Noel Gallagher, from Burnage in Manchester, are truly first-rate in the volumizing of teenage delinquency, outstripping all the great bands that gave them their sound. Watching interviews with…

On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition. The language of these policies usually distinguishes men from women by their reproductive capacity, which is assumed to be determined at birth or even at conception. Each statute mandates that its definitions of “sex,” “female,” and “male” be…

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels. Doubleday, 320 pp., $30.00 The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus by James D. Tabor. Knopf, 219 pp., $29.00 “There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written”—these are the last words of the Gospel “according to John.” John’s Gospel does tell us a good deal over its twenty-one chapters about what Jesus may have done in his three decades of earthly life, as do its three companion Gospels. Nevertheless, Christians have always wondered what is missing from the Bible record. What can be recovered of the real Jesus and his circumstances? As the Evangelist…

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green. Crash Course, 198 pp., $28.00 Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History by Vidya Krishnan. PublicAffairs, 300 pp., $30.00 By the time Mercy Lena Brown was born, in 1872, her New England farming community was becoming a ghost town. Young farmers were leaving the barren, rocky soil for jobs in the city, and the people who remained were suffering an outbreak of consumption, which seemed to move through households with no clear pattern, causing one out of every four deaths in the area. Of the nine members of the Brown family, Lena’s mother was the first to die of consumption, in 1883. Seven months later Lena’s sister Mary Olive, a twenty-year-old dressmaker, died too, becoming so pale…

We live in an era when Blacks and Whites, despite the end of de jure segregation, tend to live in different neighborhoods, go to different churches and schools, and socialize within their own racial groups. Thomas Jefferson’s world was quite dissimilar. He interacted with African Americans on a daily basis, in the most intimate circumstances, from the beginning of his life to the end. This is because he was born into a slave society. A Black woman was almost certainly young Thomas’s earliest nursemaid, and an enslaved Black woman was likely his wet nurse. Later, when his wife, Martha, had difficulty nursing their first child, the “good breast of milk” of the enslaved Ursula Granger allowed the child to thrive. In his old age Jefferson recalled that his earliest memory…