Today’s post is TLS-focused, beginning with more poetic cover versions—this time of Philip Larkin—plus the latest dispatch from our Pleistocene ancestors:
The Neanderthals live on only in [our] DNA—they vanished about 40,000 years ago—but though we’re probably responsible for their demise, there is no sign of violent ethnic cleansing. In fact, whatever Steven Pinker says, we were pretty pacific until the Neolithic, when there were farms to fail and neighbouring farmers to raid.
The same issue joins a conversation started here, if only in passing, about the British artist Lucian Freud. Peter Schjeldahl was unimpressed:
A lot of people need Lucian Freud to be a great artist. How else to explain the furor for the pretty good English portrait and figure painter?
But he was equally unimpressed by a frequent complaint:
To tax Freud with misogyny seems pointless, given that he obviously despises and in some sense wants to fuck everybody, himself included.
Reviewing Freud’s letters, along with a ne…
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