In Norwegian monthly ‘Ny Tid’ – the forum for essayistic reviews of international titles: contrasting histories of the age of British imperialism and green philosophy from Heidegger to Guattari.
The Norwegian monthly Ny Tid’s core aim is to provide a forum for essayistic reviews of international titles. The current issue features non-fiction, although film is also extensively covered – notably, the contributions to the Kosovo Documentary Festival – as well as photography.
British historyEdoardo Campanella has read Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain and Simon Heffer’s The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880–1914, noting that he is dealing with two very different books on the British Empire. Rees-Mogg – the Conservative MP mockingly referred to in the UK as the ‘Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’ – rehashes Brexit mythologies; his biography of eminent Victorians (eleven men, one woman: Victoria herself) is ‘an extreme manifestation of nostalgic nationalism’. Heffer, by contrast, shows up the ‘devastating effects of late imperialism’, focusing on ‘the superficial pomposity and national self-confidence … that served as a smokescreen for internal division and discontent.’ He writes with ‘a quality and depth of knowledge that place him in the first rank of historians’.
EcologyPhilosophy dominates a selection of books with green themes, from essays on Heidegger as an ‘ecological thinker’ to Félix Guattari’s speculations about the wasting of the Brazilian rain forests – which he sees as the final goodbye to the enlightened trust in human rationality.
More articles from Ny Tid in Eurozine; Ny Tid’s website
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Norway is guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 (16–19 October). Eurozine will be in Frankfurt to promote the cultural journals network and is organising a panel at the ‘Weltempfang’ on how to ‘break the bad news’ of climate crisis. More information
Published 11 October 2019
Original in English
First published by Eurozine
© Eurozine
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