Roundtable

Opinions and analysis from Lapham’s Quarterly writers and editors.

May 01, 2014

Gilt by Association

Portrait of Marie Antoinette, 1783, by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

The Marie Antoinette cliché is easy to not just summon, but accessorize: there is the pouf, the diamond necklace, the dressmaker’s bills, and the toy farm. There is the fat husband, the overbearing mother, and the dashing Swedish count. And then there are the turns of phrase both too flippant and too penitent to really be believed: “let them eat cake,” as she presumably nibbled her own, and “forgive me, sir, I did not mean to do it,” as she stepped on her executioner’s foot.

April 28, 2014

Trotsky’s Canadian Holiday

By Andrea Pitzer

It was a brief internment in Nova Scotia that lay the groundwork for the Soviet gulag.

April 15, 2014

Miracles and Manure

By Elias Altman

It’s a popular dismissal of revolutions to say that they always end in the tyranny they sought to overthrow. What use is the whole bloody mess if the oppressed becomes the oppressor?

March 21, 2014

Jane Austen’s Trivial Pursuits

By Ted Scheinman

Sometime during the 1990s, when big-screen adaptations of Regency novels became a near-annual tradition, a strange thing happened: Jane Austen stopped being funny.

March 15, 2014

Die Laughing

By Miles Klee

Is it any wonder that we secretly view laughter as black magic, unpredictably hazardous? Only when you hear the common evolutionary explanation for laughter: it serves to express relief. Not just from the urge to laugh, but from some awful danger, a cosmic threat imagined by and for the self.

March 10, 2014

Court Jester

By Alice Gregory

Never were politics, power, and punch lines more intertwined than in the strange case of John Wilmot. The second Earl of Rochester was a poet and playwright whose mischief-making lifestyle and caustic satirical writing got him banished from court (and invited back) on what seems to have been a routine basis. This was a man who lived as he wrote.

March 05, 2014

Going Viral in the Nineteenth Century

By Rebecca Onion

Whenever a newspaper story came up short, editors reached for the squibs.

February 22, 2014

“As for Me, I Sell Abuse”

By Ben Tarnoff

At first glance, Ambrose Bierce didn’t look like a coldblooded verbal killer. He was tall and handsome and scrupulously groomed, with a cherubic mop of golden hair. He excelled as a conversationalist and womanizer. He was also was nineteenth-century America’s greatest insult artist.

January 15, 2014

Bedside Manner

By Caleb Gardner

Comedy thrives on contradiction, and the absurdity of life is particularly refined in the hospital. Doctors discuss breakfast as they open someone’s sternum, and a delirious patient demands green Jell-O. Laughter, it seems, is one of the few genuine reactions one can have to such a paradoxical world. But it can be deceiving.

From Déja Vu

August 07, 2023

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

May 22, 2023

Revolutionary Lovebirds

2023:

Writers on strike search for romance at the picket line.

c. 1945:

Young communists engage in party matchmaking.

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