radicals

In the midst of France’s année terrible, there’s a panther loose in Paris. It’s “black as a hole and like liquid”, and those who see it take it as a bad harbinger. Who can blame them for suspecting the supernatural, when their city’s been turned upside down? Although there’s a more mundane explanation – the panther has escaped from the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes – it’s emblematic of an extraordinary and terrible year. Stef Penney’s fourth novel opens in May 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian…

Polly Toynbee’s great-grandfather Gilbert Murray, the finest classical scholar of the early 20th century – and, like so many in Toynbee’s family, an activist for what are now called progressive causes – eventually despaired of his hope for the future. “My greenness was unbelievable,” he wrote in a passage Toynbee quotes. “I believed passionately in the progress of man. It was perhaps not quite inevitable, but it only needed the removal of a few selfish and reactionary old people to make the world a new Garden of Eden,…

Images via Marvel Studios By this point, it’s less of an opinion and more of a fact that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was not the strongest possible start to Marvel’s Phase Five — just check the awful reviews, the disappointing box office, and its bizarrely delayed Disney Plus release for evidence. While Jonathan Majors‘ Kang the Conqueror is perhaps the most popular part of the threequel, maybe he should never have been in the movie in the first place, however. What if Kang instead made his big cinematic…

Lankum’s fourth album goes to new extremes, and not simply by dredging more trenches of their trademark gothic intensity. Four years after 2019’s raw-skinned The Livelong Day, with its exploratory epics, False Lankum teems with similar moments of iridescent bliss. But the 12 tracks here also unfurl into each other without a break, alternately lulling the listener then casting them into storms of shuddering sounds.Recorded in Dublin’s Hellfire Studio by day, while the band spent their nights sleeping in a Martello tower on…

Friends who have lived in communes tell me the worst thing is the endless meetings. All those issues a household bickers into resolution – who will sort the recycling, who finished the milk – are decided by committee. Yet from Findhorn ecovillage in Moray to the co-housing community at Postlip Hall, in Gloucestershire, Britain has more than 400 “intentional communities” or communes, and in the post-Covid era they’re fielding more inquiries than ever.Some people turn to co-housing to be able to afford a roof over their…