Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?

More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:

Thomas Powers on Didion and California:

'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'

Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:

'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'

Martin Amis on Didion's style:

'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'

Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:

'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.'

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Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.

Sontag in the LRB:

Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship 

‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’

James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics

‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’

Mark Grief on Sontag and identity

‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’

Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris

‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’

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Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?

More on Baldwin from the LRB:

Michael Wood on Baldwin and power 

‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’

Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin

‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’

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Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected. What does Weil have to put in their place? The answer is radical and surprising.

Read ‘Human Personality’ here

For more on Weil from the LRB archive:

Toril Moi on living like Weil 

‘If we take Weil as seriously as she took herself, our nice lives will fall apart.’

Alan Bennett on Kafka and Weil

‘Many parents, one imagines, would echo the words of Madame Weil, the mother of Simone Weil, a child every bit as trying as Kafka must have been. Questioned about her pride in the posthumous fame of her ascetic daughter, Madame Weil said: “Oh! How much I would have preferred her to be happy.”’ 

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Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English manage to resist fascism? How are the English going to defeat fascism? These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism. David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.

For more on Orwell from the LRB:

Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics

‘He was not, in fact, really a political thinker at all: he had no ideology, he proposed no plan of political action, and he was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party.’

Julian Symons on Orwell and fame

‘If George Orwell had died in 1939 he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels.’

Terry Eagleton on Orwell and experience

‘Orwell detested those, mostly on the left, who theorised about situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to sympathise with the legless.’

More from the History of Ideas:

Judith Shklar on Hypocrisy

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Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence. And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.

Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:

Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness

‘It is, one might say, a central paradox of modern family life that its members are required to mould themselves in each other’s image and yet to know, as separate individuals or egos, exactly who they are.’

Gillian Beer on Woolf and reality

‘The “real world” for Virginia Woolf was not solely the liberal humanist world of personal and social relationships: it was the hauntingly difficult world of Einsteinian physics and Wittgenstein’s private languages.’

Rosemary Hill on Woolf and domesticity

‘Woolf, who had once found it humiliating to do her own shopping, spent the last morning of her life dusting with Louie, before she put her duster down and went to drown herself.’

John Bayley on Woolf and writing

‘For Virginia Woolf wish-fulfilment was in words themselves, that protected her from herself and from society.’

Listen to David’s History of Ideas episode about Max Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’.

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Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?

Read Thoreau’s essay here

From the LRB:

Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiency

Jeremy Harding on XR and civil disobedience 

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Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt help make sense of American politics today? When does public borrowing become a recipe for national disaster? Who is really in charge of the public finances: the government or the bankers, Washington, D.C. or Wall Street? And what has all this got to do with Hume’s arguments for the morality of suicide?

Read Hume’s original essay ‘Of Public Credit’ here.

For more on Hume from the archive of the LRB:

Jonathan Rée on Hume’s voracious appetites: ‘“The Corpulence of his whole person was better fitted to communicate the Idea of the Turtle-Eating Alderman than of a refined Philosopher,” as a friend put it.’

Fara Dabhoiwala on Hume and mockery: ‘David Hume often resorted to ridicule to undermine hypocrisy or superstition, even if he doubted its capacity to settle controversial questions, arguing that mockery was as likely to distort as to reveal the truth.’

John Dunn on Hume and us: ‘Hume is in some ways so very modern . . . But just because he is in some ways so close to us, it is easy to lose the sense that in many others his beliefs and experiences stand at some little distance from our own.’

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Episode one in our series on the great essays is about Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read. From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheism to the pitfalls of faith, from sex to religion and back again, Montaigne wrote the book of himself, which was also a guide to what it means to be human. Elephants, civil war, gout, cosmology, torture, tennis balls, disease, diets, and politics too: all life is here.

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For our last episode before Christmas David answers some of your questions about the History of Ideas series – What would Dickens have made of Trump? How would reparations work? Which essays are missing from the list? 

Coming up: the whole series on the great essays, one a day, every day, starting on Christmas Day.

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As we wrap up our History of Ideas series David discusses what makes a great essay and whether the best contemporary writing is as good as what went before. The answer is yes, as shown by Jiayang Fan’s brilliant 2020 essay ‘How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda’. David explores why this is such a remarkable example of what can be done with the form and why the art of the essay is alive and well.

Read Jiayang Fan’s essay here

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This week David talks to the economists Dieter Helm and Diane Coyle about the challenges of building sustainability into the way we live now. Why is GDP such a poor guide to long-term economic well-being? How can we stop squandering future resources?  What should the next Labour government do to create a sustainable economy – and what will happen if they don’t?

Dieter Helm’s new book is available to download for free here

Read the Bennett Institute report on Universal Basic Infrastructure here

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This week David and Lea answer your questions about democracy. When does democratic freedom shade over into anarchy? What’s the connection between democracy and human rights? Do the voters choose the government or does the government choose the voters? Plus: what makes Lea an optimist about socialism?

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In the penultimate episode in our series on the great essays, David talks about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Black American life has been marked by injustice from the beginning: this essay explores what can – and what can’t – be done to remedy it, from slavery to the housing market, from Mississippi to Chicago. Plus, what has this story got to do with the origins of the state of Israel?

Read the original essay here.

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In the latest instalment of David’s ongoing conversation with Lea Ypi about the past, present and future of democracy they discuss whether democratic politics can ever break free from the stranglehold of the nation-state. When and why did nationalism take such a strong grip of the idea of democracy? What are the international or cosmopolitan alternatives? And can a democracy police its borders without having actual borders or actual police?

Listen to the previous episodes in this series here.

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This week David talks to the historian and essayist Jill Lepore about where the chaotic last decade of American politics fits into the longer history of the nation. When and how did gun rights become a matter of principle rather than of pragmatism? What makes insurrection so appealing to so many people? Is another civil war really a possibility? Plus, what did the January 6th Committee miss about January 6th?

Jill Lepore’s new book is The American Beast: Essays 2012-2022

Listen to Gary Gerstle on PPF discussing what happened to the Republican Party

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This week David explores a different way of thinking about the current epoch: what if this isn’t the Anthropocene but the Leviacene? Who or what is really driving planetary destruction? Can human nature explain it? Or should we be looking at the political and economic superpowers that are leaving their marks all over the natural world?

For more on these themes, David’s new book The Handover is available now, including as an audiobook. 

Listen to our earlier podcast with historian of science Meehan Crist on Malthus and Malthusianism.

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This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose the hidden workings of power. It is an essay that connects digital technology, medieval mystery and Dan Brown. Plus David talks about the hidden meaning of Julian Assange.

More from the LRB:

Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange

‘I’d never been with a person who had such a good cause and such a poor ear.’

Frank Kermode on the Name of the Rose

‘This novel has so much in it that differs from any known kind of detective story that we must look to Eco’s pre-semiotic career for help.’

Jenny Diski on Eco and ugliness

‘The breadth of Eco’s search spreads out to include disgust, horror, fear, obscenity, misogyny, perversity, bigotry, social exclusiveness, repression, inexplicability, evil, deformation, degradation, heterogeneity.’

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This week David and Lea resume their conversation – and their differences of opinion – about how to understand politics in the modern world. What is it reasonable to expect of democracy? Are its failures because of bad design or bad faith? And why don’t we have more democracy at the international level where it’s really needed? This is the start of a series of monthly conversations between David and Lea about rethinking the ideas that made the modern world.

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This week David asks Mary Beard what the Roman Empire can tell us about the nature of unaccountable power, then and now. How did Roman emperors rule when they had so little knowledge of the lives of their subjects? Can absolute personal power ever escape the limits of biology, from sex to death? And who are the modern-day equivalent of the Caesars: democratic populists or tech titans?

Mary Beard’s new book is Emperor of Rome 

Read or listen to Mary Beard’s LRB lecture on Women in Power 

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