Body and soul

One of the tragicomic features of the book-reviewing life is that now and again someone commissions you to write something but it ends up not quite suiting the publication in question, for one reason or another: this is sorrow-inducing on both sides, of course, but not at all calamitous, and a piece that I wrote in that sort of circumstance in December has now happily found a home thanks to the proprietors of the Valve. Here it is: a review of Marina Warner's new book Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-first Century.

Also work-related: on the off chance that you happen to be in Princeton on Thursday morning & also with a strong interest in the eighteenth century, come and hear me ruminate on original sin (and the conference as a whole, on religion and the English Enlightenment, promises to be extremely interesting).