Matthew Longo

The Picnic by Matthew Longo, winner of the Orwell Prize 2024, tells the exhilarating story of the greatest border breach in Cold War history. This gripping reconstruction details the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989, a pivotal moment that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In August 1989, a group...

An extraordinarily dramatic reconstruction of the greatest border breach in Cold War history. In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable—they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain—and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the...

How the "invisible hand" of the nervous system makes the human hand such an evolutionary success. The hand has a central role in both human evolution and cultural development—in our descent and in our ascent. It is, Immanuel Kant said, "the visible part of the brain." It is the invisible that concerns Matthew Longo in The Invisible Hand, a wide-ranging,...