Reading Lounge

1. Takahata Isao obituary: Studio Ghibli’s quiet visionary of the real

2. "But while the Triple S does make its wearer look dainty, the shoe does not feel agile on the foot. Returning home after a long day in the city, my feet felt tired, oversized, and swollen, much like the body of the Triple S itself."

3. Drunk on genocide: how the Nazis celebrated murdering Jews

4. "Rochester is perhaps the single greatest pornographer produced in the English language. The literary critic Carol Fabricant writes in “Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment” (the Journal of English and Germanic Philology) that the “poems focus to such an extent upon genitalia of various sizes and capacities that these, by their sheer quantity, emerge as the central objects of Rochester’s world.”

5. Illicit Love Letters: Albert Camus and Maria Casares

6. The day 385 years ago when bananas made their British debut