Luke McShane

Harry Potter’s game of chess

Novice chess players can seem spellbound by the power of their own queen, zigzagging hither and thither in desperate search of bounty. You soon learn that on the chessboard strength is weakness and weakness is strength; the queen must flee from any attack while a pawn is, well, only a pawn in your game.

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Niall Gooch

The Turner prize doesn’t make sense anymore

In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing philosophy in the US. ‘The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ He was giving voice

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