Olympic Ironies

For those who are dreading the next two weeks – for those for whom the last seven years, since the dramatic announcement of London’s appointment as the host city for the 2012 Olympic Games, have been a torment – the French academic Marc Perelman’s polemic could not be more perfect; an ideal accompaniment, perhaps, to a fortnight that might best be spent, for the naysayers, doubters and outright opponents, in an isolation tank. Not that Barbaric Sport confines its withering contempt to the Olympics – although it does, somewhat opportunistically, lead off with them; football also comes in for a

culture November 17, 2009

The Humbling by Philip Roth

"There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think," wrote Amy Bellette in a letter in Philip Roth's 2007 novel Exit Ghost. "That time is coming to an end." How enthusiastically Roth himself endorsed this position was not entirely unambiguous – Bellette, an elderly woman whose mental processes had been ravaged by a brain tumour, might in any case have been acting as the mouthpiece of a long-dead writer – but he put the words out there, folding them into a larger argument about the ethics and intellectual purpose of literary biography and the perils of mistaking gossip for