Read the lecture: lrb.me/hk0
Globalisation promised a borderless world, but it has delivered an age of neurotically policed zones and cubicles. To cross a border legally now involves an unprecedented level of scrutiny: fingerprint and iris scans, chips embedded in your passport, hidden sensors to detect your heartbeat and carbon dioxide emissions from thirty feet away, the tick-box confessional of ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .' Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.
ABOUT THE LRB
A fortnightly magazine of books and ideas, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English since 1979. Each issue contains up to 15 long reviews and essays by academics, writers and journalists. There are also shorter art and film reviews, as well as poems and a lively letters page.
A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move on to reassessing the reputation of Pythagoras, follow that with articles on the situation in Iraq, the 19th-century super-rich, Nabokov’s unpublished novel, how saints got to be saints, the life and work of William Empson, and an assessment of the poetry of Alice Oswald.
10 сен 2024