Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Book of Heaven
By Patricia Storace
The world was created with a knife and a prayer. The knife you can see well, especially in the late summer nights. Look up after dark; you will see its green jade hilt, the sickle of brilliants that forms the curve of the scimitar's blade, and the field of red stars sprayed around it, the drops of blood. It forms the topmost section of the constellation called the Murder, though decrees have been issued, as yet with no success, to change its name by compulsion to the Sacrifice. Nevertheless, the true name of this group of stars is the Murder, and there the knife quivers unmistakably at night, lodged where it was flung back into the heart of heaven. Whatever human beings would suppress or refuse to see, the heavens record their true acts and their true dreams in the ineradicable testament of stars.

Francisco Goldman on Roberto Bolaño
Joyce Carol Oates on Amnesiac Novels
Claire Messud on Andrew O'Hagan
Hilary Mantel on Mischa Berlinski
Tim Parks on Elfriede Jelinek
Anita Desai on Primo Levi
Al Alvarez on Ian McEwan
and an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year

Our Biotech Future
By Freeman Dyson
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

Can We Know Her?
By Michael Tomasky
On A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein and Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.

Putin Strikes Again
By Jamey Gambrell

Plus: Helen Epstein on cigarette smoking, Ian Buruma on Werner Herzog, Garry Wills on William James, David Cole on John Ashcroft, Thomas Powers on George Tenet, Colm Tóibín on The Portrait of a Lady, and more.

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