London Review of Books

When I was 22 I did what I’d wanted to do since I was twelve: I put my life on hold and followed my favorite band. I had just finished my first proper job: editing a budget guide to Ireland, assembled (like all the books in the now defunct Let’s Goseries) by quickly trained college students. I’d spent all summer under fluorescent lights in the Let’s Go office, receiving updates by air mail from the students who had been hired to crisscross the island, checking and sometimes rewriting their prose.

The Knight’s Maze, Eastnor Castle For John Our teenagers turn kids again, amazed Between tall hedges, planted to confound. They race ahead to the unknown, unfazed To meet with cul-de-sacs, and turn around. Between tall hedges planted to confound, Retracing steps – no cell phones and no map – They meet with cul-de-sacs, and turn around Laughing. We follow, part and overlap, Retracing steps. No cell phones and no map, They thread the living labyrinth of yew. Laughing, we follow, part, and overlap.

Asense​ of ‘boundlessness’ afflicts Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Adam is a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, using phone cards to call home to Kansas because he’s not settled enough to own a mobile phone.

The​ word is not the thing. In spoken language a word is a distinctive sound or series of sounds. It does not have a ‘natural’ relationship to the thing it stands for. Ferdinand de Saussure theorised that a sign is made up of two parts: the signifier (the physical form taken by the sign, for instance a spoken word or its written representation) and the signified (the concept the signifier picks out).

Bait,​ Mark Jenkin’s first feature film, earned him the Bafta for best newcomer in 2020. Jenkin had been making short films for seventeen years by then. Most of them had been filmed with old cameras of one kind or another – super 8, 16 mm – and some had frames with rounded corners, which placed them somewhere between generations-old home movie and rediscovered newsreel footage.

As​ a twelve-year-old Boy Scout and altar boy, I always brought my gun to church. After murmuring my responses in the Latin mass, gleeful when I heard the ‘Ite, missa est,’ I hurried to the nearby woods to blast away at beer cans or paper targets. Father Burns sighed whenever he saw me stowing my bolt-action Mossberg .22 calibre rifle in my locker and slipping on my cassock and surplice.

The 2300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Osnabrück, northwest Germany, have been confronted with an unexpected plan for industrial transformation. Last month, it was reported that the car manufacturer was in talks with the Israeli state-owned arms company Rafael to make missile defence systems based on Israel’s Iron Dome.

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William Davies discusses tactical voting in UK elections (LRB, 19 March). The French electoral system is tailor-made for tactical voting and voters are masters of the art. If an absolute majority isn’t obtained in a first round there is a second round. At the presidential level only two candidates compete in the second round.

Last Friday afternoon, two days after the ceasefire was announced and two days before the peace talks in Islamabad failed, I went to a café. For the previous forty days we had been cut off from the world – not only because of the bombing, but because of the internet blackout. Making plans had been impossible; people either ran into each other or they didn’t. That afternoon, most of my friends were at the café.