‘At moments Hitler’s head brushed against Gideon’s cheek like a clump of wet leaves.’
Note: In its entirety, George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. is about one third longer than the text we present here. The novella has seventeen chapters of varying lengths; we do not print six of those chapters (in the original, numbers 2, 4, 5, 8, 11 and 12), and take only part f…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Papa embodied, as did every corner of our Paris home, the tenor, the prodigality and glow of Jewish-European and Central-European emancipation.’
‘Come Christmas, sounds mix and multiply. And are shot through with smells.’
‘His requests did stretch the resources, almost all-encompassing, of the sound-archive. But that is part of the game.’
‘No. Listen to me. God's confidence in Abraham was not total. Let me hammer out my meaning.’
‘I don’t think we have quite processed yet what those months of isolation did to us – a time of fear and daily death tolls and also of unprecedented curtailment of our freedom of movement. But there were consolations.’
Editor Sigrid Rausing introduces the issue.
