Mailing List


Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

  Billed as ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World’, Adam Curtis’s new series of films CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD (2021) is his longest and most ambitious yet The six-part, eight-hour series covers themes familiar to long-term followers of Curtis’s documentaries: the tensions between individualist and collective approaches to politics; and the paralysis and paranoia that came with the discrediting of twentieth-century ideologies, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as politicians ceased to offer a better future and instead became tribunes of unaccountable corporate interests, to whom they had outsourced many functions of their increasingly undemocratic states Among the emotions Curtis explores are the feelings of impotence caused by this situation, the anger that motivates political action, the hope that comes with efforts to change the world, and the disappointment and sadness when those efforts fail   As ever, Curtis populates his overarching narrative by cutting between the most significant political figures of the time – Thatcher and Blair, Nixon and Clinton, Putin and Trump, Bannon and Cummings – and a range of marginal or lesser-known individuals, the links between whom are often conceptual rather than concrete Rather than fixating on shadowy male intellectuals or financiers, as in previous series such as THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (2002) or THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES (2004), CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD follows more women than usual, and several historical figures from minority backgrounds who were politically liberal or on the left These include black radical and convicted murderer Michael X; trans woman Julia Grant, star of a BBC documentary about her transition in 1979–80; Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur, mother of Tupac; and Mao Zedong’s fourth wife Jiang Qing, as part of a new focus on communist China   Running parallel to these stories of people who tried to change the world is an exploration of conspiracy theories Curtis takes us from Kerry Thornley’s invention of ‘Operation Mindfuck’ in 1968 – Thornley spread stories about how ‘the Illuminati’ were behind the civil unrest in the US in the 1960s; the intention was to show the absurdity of conspiracy theories, but

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

Interview

April 2017

Interview with Mark Greif

Daniel Cohen

Interview

April 2017

Since 2004, when his work started to appear in n+1, the magazine he co-founded, Mark Greif has taken contemporary...

feature

Issue No. 5

The White Review No. 5 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 5

One of the two editors of The White Review recently committed a faux pas by reacting with undisguised and indeed...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Sun Yung Shin

poetry

September 2016

  Autoclonography   for performance   In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required