Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime’. She was known and admired, but on nothing like the scale that has caused her to be described since her death in 1992 at the age of 51 as ‘one of the 20th century’s best writers’ and inspired Lambeth Council to name a street in Brixton after her. This posthumous enthusiasm is not the first major reassessment of a reputation that always had something of a switchback ride.

Most analysts divide postwar capitalism into two periods. The first extends from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The end of the second appears to have been announced by the crisis – at first a ‘financial’ crisis, now often a ‘debt’ crisis – that broke out in 2008. The precise boundary between the postwar eras gets drawn differently depending on which feature of the terrain is emphasised. In terms of overall growth rates, it was with the recession of 1973-74 that the surge after the Second World War gave way to deceleration across the wealthy world. Intellectually, Milton Friedman’s Nobel

This July will mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish intellectual who committed suicide in 1940. Since the publication of his collected writings fifteen years after his death, Benjamin’s enigmatic essays like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Task of the Translator” have become canonical in fields like media studies and comparative literature, and equally influential outside the academy. But unlike the steady rise of his posthumous reputation, Benjamin’s biography was full of false starts and thwarted ambitions. Rejected for jobs at several universities and forced to flee Nazi

Caligula has generally gone down in history as a mad megalomaniac: so mad that he gave his favorite horse a palace, lavish purple clothing, a retinue of servants, and even had plans to appoint it to the consulship, the highest political office below the emperor himself. In fact his extravagant treatment of the animal was a pointed joke. Caligula was satirizing the aims and ambitions of the Roman aristocracy: in their pursuit of luxury and empty honors, they appeared no less silly than the horse.

Life is a little tricky for the inhabitants of Amelia Gray’s stories. They might fall in love with a bit of frozen tilapia or find themselves policed by javelinas. There are multiplying vultures to contend with and hair that must be eaten, and the problem of trying to find a girlfriend in the post-apocalypse. Perhaps closer to articulated impulses than fully-formed fictions, Gray’s work tackles our emotional realities through unreal set-ups: A penguin and an armadillo walk into a bar; a woman’s boyfriend takes up residence inside a suitcase. It is this try-anything aesthetic that invigorates and sometimes undermines Gray’s

Robert Hughes brings an impressive erudition to bear upon his biography of Rome, tracing the city’s rise from a patchwork foundation of local tribes to the site of La Dolce Vita. Sprawling subjects are Hughes’s specialty: His reputation as a prominent art and cultural critic rests on a series of expansive tomes, from American Visions: Epic History of Art in America to The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, and Rome itself is subdivided into prodigious chunks on the Augustan age and the later Empire to the Grand Tour and Fascism. From mythical origins to caput mundi, from a

Perhaps the best way to understand what drove Roland Barthes, then a thirty-nine-year-old professor of literature, to begin writing the series of short essays later published as “Mythologies” is to take a brief glance at the myth of the supposedly decadent influence of French theory on American intellectual life.

One of the most exhausting aspects of life in the age of digital immediacy—a time when popularity is measured in Facebook “likes” and when important news stories trend on Twitter before being recognized by the media—is constantly having to hear about life in the age of digital immediacy. It seems that there’s an entire camp of journalism devoted to proclaiming its own redundancy in the face of social networks, memes, and the broadband-heightened rate of information exchange. And it’s hard to believe that a generation raised on continual technological advances can be so easily impressed with so little. The popular