Real and imagined versions of the island and the microbe come together to tell a new story about geopolitical relations between two successive Anglophone empires: the British and the American. Bassam Sidiki assembles a vast archive of literary, cultural, and medical documents to argue that claims of British or American insularity are specious; these Anglophone empires have been economically, culturally, and scientifically interdependent since the turn of the century to the present as the British century gave way to the American. Ironically, the inter-imperial relations that refute imperial insularity are often most visible in island-like spaces such as gardens, ships, and brothels, and in actual tropical islands where the two imperial powers have worked together—or at odds—to hold infectious diseases at bay.
Sidiki documents historical and imaginary representations of infectious diseases such as the plague, venereal disease, Spanish flu, and Hansen’s disease in the long twentieth century, and how these diseases brought the British and US empires into simultaneous collaboration and competition across the Anglophone world.
Explores the nature of modern authoritarianism to confront and counter the increasing dangers it poses to contemporary democracies
New understanding of the character and motives of modern authoritarian leaders
Examination of the distinction between populists and authoritarians
A new typology of authoritarian leaders, distinguishing between the nationalist, religious and ideological tyrants
A new ‘manual’ of authoritarian leadership, providing a novel theoretical account of the techniques deployed by ‘smart’ authoritarians
An assessment of the modern tools employed by authoritarians, including propaganda and communication technology
An evaluation of the theoretical and political vulnerability of democracy to modern authoritarianism
The Modern Tyrant argues that modern authoritarian leaders resemble classical tyrants but are distinctive in three ways: their ambitions for wealth and glory are shaped by modernity (especially nationalism, religion and ideology); their techniques are novel, combining authoritarian and democratic forms, and finally, they are much more powerful, able to exploit modern propaganda techniques and technology to enhance their control and dominance.
As I said in the last update, I went to the EUI in Florence at the beginning of February with a nearly complete draft of my manuscript on Indo-European Thought in Twentieth-Century France, and had the plan to leave at the end of March with a better one. I made good progress while there, and the text is definitely much better now, though there is still work ahead of me.
The view from the EUI history department, just outside of the office I was given – the building in the middle is the Badia Fiesolana of the EUI, including the library
The early chapters were in worse shape. There were some things I’d left undeveloped, some of which were left in that state when I became unwell in June 2023 and was off work for several months, but which I didn’t fully resolve when I returned to work. Now these sections really needed to be finished and all those issues resolved.
In some ways I appreciated the small bits which needed to be written, rather than just edited. Like I imagine most people, I find editing difficult, and often tedious, and it was nice to have some more creative bits to do. I’ve said before that I like not knowing how a text is all going to come together until late in the process, since it helps to keep my interest. As soon as I know exactly what I need to do to complete something it becomes mechanical and I want to do something else. But I was often cursing my past self for leaving little indications like “[discuss]” and “[develop]” and “[find source]” in the text or notes.
There was also the inevitable revision which comes from having a clearer sense of the whole towards the end of this stage of writing than I had when I drafted the earlier parts. I’d tried to resolve most of the reference questions before I left the UK, but inevitably there were a host of things to check. Some were easily resolved at the EUI, others could be found online, but there were quite a few which needed inter-library loans or had to be addressed back in the UK.
A few relevant secondary pieces have been published since I drafted early parts, and I’ve tried to take these into account. There are a lot of archival sources which I’ve been using, and some of those I have seen since the initial chapters were drafted, so what they reveal needed to be worked into the narrative. In a few cases, I realised I now no longer agreed with what I’d initially written – new evidence had come to light, later claims required a revision of earlier ones, or I was just wrong before.
There were transitions which needed work, or framing devices for chapters or sections. Some of these felt like putting the last few pieces into a jigsaw – a nice feeling when something begins to feel right.
There are also a lot of fiddly things – working with two different editions of a text at different times, and wanting to reference a single one, or using a collected works or essay collection in preference to individual pieces. My practice of double referencing to the original language and an English translation requires a bit of work. I might have had access to a translation after I’d drafted something, or written it with only the translation, and going back to the original changed how I saw it. Standardising the translation of terms can take some time. I had often put the original language text in the note, which was helpful now, but could be deleted once I’d decided what choices to make. In a few instances I had references to a source cited by someone else, and I wanted to find and read the original. This is nearly always worthwhile. Lots of things were read again in whole or in part. And there is a continual process of new reading.
There are a few things remaining where I cannot find the source. Where does, for example, Georges Charachidzé recount that particular anecdote I remember him saying about Dumézil? If two secondary accounts give a different date for someone leaving an editorial board, which is correct? If I can find a quote in a text-only version of a book, then I know the source is correct, but what’s the original page number? Why doesn’t the page number of a quote match the edition I have access to? Is that letter mentioned by someone genuine, when their archival reference does not make sense and it’s not in the collected correspondence of those two people? Is that date of a letter correct, or have they misread the often-awful handwriting? Where did that archival file go, if it is missing from the place it should be, and the archivist cannot find it? Will that file at the Archives Nationales ever be available again, since for two years it’s been withdrawn due to asbestos testing in the warehouse? And would I want to experience the archival dust on it if it was? There are a lot of these things, which are on a long list which keeps having things added to it, and occasionally things ticked off.
I have a few more pieces for that series in development – about the time a few people from the Tel Quel journal went to China, including Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, and the life and work of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, which is a digression from a digression, but which I’ve found interesting to write a little about. Most recently, I wrote a short piece on Kristeva’s portraits of Benveniste, especially in her novel The Samurai. And I returned to an earlier piece and revised it for this series, about Foucault’s 1972 visit to Attica prison.
On the last day in Florence I drafted the Conclusion. I had plenty of notes for this already, and moved some material from earlier in the text into it, but it felt like a good way to bring my time there to a close. I’ve been back in the UK for a while and am now working in various libraries to try to complete the manuscript.
I also now know what the next project will be, after I complete this text and the editorial work on the new translation and edition of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic. It will look at the experience of French academics who were prisoners of war in Germany during the Second World War. Some elements are known but there are a lot of underexplored stories. I’ve written about two of the people I’ll be discussing – Étienne Wolff and Fernand Braudel – on this site, and about the general idea beyond the project here. Again, it will be archive-based and I’ve just received a small grant to fund that work. It won’t begin until the late summer, and will be fitted around teaching over the next couple of years.
Julia Kristeva’s first novel The Samurai was published in 1990. It’s not the greatest novel, but it’s well known that the book is a thinly disguised autobiography, with the central character Olga Morena modelled on herself. Many of the famous names of ‘French theory’ feature – there is one who has written a history of madness, an anthropologist with an interest in linguistics, a Marxist who murdered his wife, a flamboyant and adulterous psychoanalyst, a semiotician who analyses literature and popular culture… The group around the Tel Quel journal are featured, the journal renamed Maintenant, including Kristeva’s husband Philippe Sollers, with their 1974 trip to China a particularly important moment in the story.
I’d read The Samurai before, but reread it recently, in part because of an interest in the China visit (on which, more soon). The other reason was because Kristeva knew Émile Benveniste in the last years of his life, and he appears in the book as Fernand Benserade. I knew this in part already, but I wanted to revisit how close the descriptions of ‘Benserade’ are to the memories of Benveniste that Kristeva shares in her various writings on him.
Olga is told that Ilya Romanski (Roman Jakobson) will be working with Benserade to set up an International Semantics Society, and she is appointed as general secretary. Here’s the longest description from the novel:
The inaccessible Benserade, who knew forty languages, spoke twenty, and because of his intelligence ruled the frisky computer logicians with a rod of iron, invited them and Olga to his place to prepare for the London meeting of the international Semantics Society. The apartment was dimly lit, full of the smell of fusty books, and pervaded by the fastidious bachelor charm of its owner, seventy years old and shy as a schoolboy. Watching him bring in the trolley laden with coffee and cookies. Carole saw him as a medieval monk. But no – he was a faithful subject of the Utopian asterisk prefixed to Indo-European words that are supposed to belong to the premigratory period. He soared so far above human necessity that there was nothing animal left about him. Yes, that was it – Benserade was a plant, he might have had a place in her garden. Or even in the loft itself: a faithful man, the only faithful man. A conifer. A cypress. She’d put him in the sun to fill him with air and chlorophyll (Les Samouraïs,133-34; The Samurai,100).
She also mentions her asking him about signing the Surrealist Manifesto “Révolution d’abord et toujours” in 1925, which he initially tried to pass off as a coincidence of names, before admitting to her in private that it was him, but now as a Professor at the Collège de France he had to keep up appearances (134-35/101). Much later in the book Olga’s friend Carole recounts how at a conference, “Benserade, who always behaves himself, was as bored as a schoolboy in an algebra lesson, but surreptitiously read Artaud’s Letters from Rodez while the others were droning out their papers” (274-75/206), and how he said that the two genius figures of French linguistics were Artaud and Mallarmé (275/206).
Olga also mentions his stroke, how he was found unable to speak and without identification papers, and that it took two days before the medical care knew who he was (233/309). He had not kept up his health insurance and was in poor-quality institutions, when his friends felt he should be in a private clinic and were debating what could be done to support him (235/312-13). She recounts one visit to him, in which he shakingly traced the word ‘theo’ on her chest with his finger, and how she wonders what this meant for his long-buried Jewish faith (235-36/313).
All of these moments are interesting, but if they were simply written in a novel, even one as transparent as this, I would be hesitant in making much of them. In case it was not already obvious, in a 2018 article Kristeva spells out who everyone is and her purpose in writing it: “Arnaud Bréal (Barthes), Maurice Lauzun (Lacan), Strich-Meyer (Lévi-Strauss), Wurst (Althusser), Sterner (Foucault), Edelman (Goldmann), Benserade (Benveniste)” (“L’Avenir d’une révolte”, 6). Even though the portraits of figures in the book are easy to identify, it is a novel, and there are some elements which seem unlikely to have happened in quite that way.
But the stories about Benserade are not simply plausible from other sources, they are also recounted by Kristeva herself, either in her writings about Benveniste – she wrote a preface to his Dernières leçons/Last Lectures, for example – or interviews. Here, for example, is her description of visiting Benveniste for the work on the International Association of Semiotic Studies:
Our meetings took place at his home, in the rue Monticelli, near the Porte d’Orléans. Still today I remember his office as a ‘sacred’ place (so it appeared to the timid girl I then was), in which the great scholar, with his smile of vivid intelligence, seemed to guard the secrets of the immemorial Indo-European and Iranian worlds. It was a rather dark office, where books carpeted the walls and strewed the floor, old library stock of which the odour, mixed with the steam of tea which, along with dry biscuits that we never touched, for me evoked ancient parchment scrolls. The administrative details quickly dispensed with, the professor enquired about my work… During these meetings Benveniste acted as teacher, protector and attentive listener (“Préface”, 34-35; “Preface”, 21).
She recalls this in similar terms in her book of interviews with Samuel Dock (Je me voyage, 100-1). In her writings, she says that it was her copy of Artaud’s Letters from Rodez that he asked to borrow, and that he told her about the genius of Artaud and Mallarmé. Kristeva’s early work on literature and linguistics means he would have found a receptive ear.
I’ll be discussing Kristeva’s debt to Benveniste, especially in her early work, elsewhere. As well as her early books, she led two collections honouring him – a special issue of Langages in 1971 with the title “Epistémologie de la linguistique”, and the Langue, discours, société book she edited with Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet. Those are important, certainly, as analyses of his work, but the biographical comments she makes about him are particularly valuable since he was such a private man and little about his life is well-known.
References
Julia Kristeva ed. “Les Épistémologies de la linguistique”, Langages 24, 1971.
Julia Kristeva, “Mémoires”, L’Infini 1, 1983, 39-54.
Julia Kristeva, Les samouraïs, Paris: Fayard, 1990; The Samurai: A Novel, trans. Barbara Bray, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Julia Kristeva, “Préface: Émile Benveniste, un linguiste qui ne dit ni ne cache, mais signifie”, in Benveniste, Dernières leçons, Émile Benveniste, Dernières Leçons: Collège de France 1968 et 1969, ed. Jean-Claude Coquet and Irène Fenoglio, Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 2012, 13-40; “Preface: Émile Benveniste, a Linguist Who Neither Says Nor Hides, but Signifies”, in Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, trans. John E. Joseph, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 1-30.
Julia Kristeva, “La linguistique, l’universel et le ‘pauvre linguiste’” in Irène Fenoglio et. al. Autour d’Émile Benveniste, Paris: Seuil, 2016, 97-152.
Julia Kristeva, Je me voyage: Mémoires—Entretiens avec Samuel Dock, Paris: Fayard, 2016.
Julia Kristeva, Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet eds., Langue, discours, société: Pour Émile Benveniste, Paris: Seuil, 1975.
Julia Kristeva, “L’Avenir d’une révolte”, L’Infini 143, 2018, 3-11 (French; English).
This is the 68th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
In a region known for its export of oil, Monarchies of Extraction explores how the Gulf states are simultaneously defined by the importation of food. Charting the economics and politics of the Gulf through an examination of its food system, Christian Henderson demonstrates how these states constitute a distinct social metabolism. Starting with the pre-oil phase, this book examines the politics of agrarian change in the Gulf. In the contemporary period, Henderson considers the way that the Gulf states represent ‘inverted farms’, where the import of prodigious quantities of agricultural commodities has enabled these economies to overcome their lack of arable land. As a result of this trade, states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia have developed their own agribusiness sectors. Henderson further shows how food and consumption in the Gulf states constitute political questions of diet, sustainability, and boycott.
A first-of-its-kind handbook outlining best practices and common pitfalls for students and textual scholars interested in beginning to work with manuscripts
While manuscripts are rare in most of the world today, they were once ubiquitous. Before the printing press, literature was preserved and transmitted through handwritten copies containing variant readings, mistakes, corrections, and other unique features. Those who study premodern texts, however, often use as their primary sources not these diverse artifacts but critical editions that present a single convenient hybrid text.
Brent Nongbri and Liv Ingeborg Lied argue that knowledge of manuscripts is important for all interpreters of ancient texts, even if learning how to study them can be confusing and intimidating. In this book they draw on their decades of experience with Jewish and Christian manuscripts to demystify manuscript work. Combining their interests in manuscripts as material artifacts with the ethical issues surrounding the study of manuscripts, Lied and Nongbri guide students through the main phases of research, from considerations of provenance and access to the practicalities of on-site research, analysis, and publication. The book includes aids for locating manuscripts, helpful case studies, tips for organizing data, a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and more.
Written in an engaging style with students in mind, this handbook provides an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to study a manuscript for the first time.
In this book, Morgan Golf-French offers a new interpretation of late Enlightenment German historiography in relation to ideas about race, culture, and politics. By paying close attention to the institutions within which these ideas were articulated, Golf-French reveals their complex and idiosyncratic development in the work of the prominent—and controversial—historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Christoph Meiners, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Charles de Villers. As the book shows, these ideas and their authors not only shaped the major controversies of the time, from the rise of abolitionism to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, but produced tropes and arguments of lasting significance in European thought.
The book argues that the ideas about race and culture which emerged in the years preceding the French Revolution were crucial in shaping German responses to the crises years of 1789–1815. Readers will discover both the contemporary significance of these ideas in early modern Germany and important insights into their long-term impact. As the book argues, the Enlightenment should be understood on its own terms, as an important phase in European intellectual history ultimately bound to the world of ancien régime Europe.
The Moment of Cubism – One of Berger’s most important collections of art criticism wherein he suggests that Cubism was a moment rather than a movement and makes a case for Cubism’s revolutionary influence
Landscapes – A survey of the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger’s understanding of the world
Corker’s Freedom – A tender and bittersweet novel of a man’s dreams of freedom and romance
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Images can play a key role in communication – but climate change imagery can be formulaic and narrow in perspective. Going beyond polar bears and wildfires, this book is a manifesto for opening up the visual discourse on climate.
Rather than portraying scenarios that can be remote from many people’s lives, Saffron O’Neill shows how images can be powerful tools to engage viewers and enable them to connect different issues together. With engaging case studies and practical advice throughout, the book shows how visuals can represent climate change in more diverse, equitable, inclusive and responsible ways.
