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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....

Rumours of impending conflict can wreak a particular type of havoc This is not as physically manifest as the brutality of war, but less tangible, less spectacular There are no destroyed buildings or dead bodies; rather, the spectre of war casts its shadow over economic statistics and mental health reports   People often think journalists are endowed with a special prescience ‘When do you think the war will happen?’ I am regularly asked in Beirut Last September the question hung upon whether the US would bomb Syria, whilst lately the concern has been to do with the prospect of civil war as the Syrian conflict impacts Lebanon In the years following the 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel, I would be asked: ‘Do you think Israel will invade this summer?’ And a long-term staple asked frequently throughout the years: ‘What do you think of the situation?’ When I moved to Beirut in 2002, such instability was less apparent The Israelis had recently left with their tails between their legs after eighteen years of occupation in Southern Lebanon Damascus was in control and keeping the squabbling Lebanese factions from each other’s throats Beirut was in the midst of a construction frenzy; tearing down bullet-riddled and shelled out buildings to rebuild after the sixteen-year civil war Those Lebanese who had moved abroad during the war years were increasingly returning, and there was a degree of stability The Syrian occupation itself was not particularly discernible, especially in Beirut It was within national politics that Syrian control was manifest and in certain corrupt practices – for example, the skimming of profits generated by state institutions like Casino du Liban The stifling of free speech was another aspect of this control, as no criticism of Damascus was allowed in the media In 2002, when I was cutting my teeth as a journalist at Lebanon’s only English language newspaper, The Daily Star, an editor warned me what was taboo: ‘No Syria, no human rights, no homosexuality’   If you kept your head down, the problems of daily life were less to do with politics and more to do with

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

feature

September 2013

For All Mankind: A Brief Cultural History of the Moon

Henry Little

feature

September 2013

For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable. Alternately a heavenly body, the...

feature

November 2011

The nobility of confusion: occupying the imagination

Drew Lyness

feature

November 2011

The Oakland Police Officers Association in California said something clever recently: ‘As your police officers, we are confused.’ It...

feature

October 2014

Noise & Cardboard: Object Collection's Operaticism

Ellery Royston

Object Collection

feature

October 2014

The set is made of painted cardboard. Four performers grab clothes from a large pile and feedback emanates from...

 

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