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The Call of the Weird

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Last Gasp Apparitions, 4 April 2024

Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect 
by John Sloan.
Oxford, 285 pp., £78, June 2023, 978 0 19 286687 5
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Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum 
by Owen Davies.
Oxford, 350 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 19 887300 6
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... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...

Victor Ludorum

Julian Symons, 20 December 1990

The Complete Short Stories 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 1220 pp., £25, November 1990, 0 7011 3712 6
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Lasting Impressions 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 171 pp., £15.99, November 1990, 0 7011 3606 5
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... chin, pending below an ever open mouth ... he wore on a monumental nose a pair of pince-nez with a black ribbon to them.’ The full description occupies a long paragraph and is a touch overwritten but remains remarkable, and Marching Spain is an observant and enjoyable book. The years of self-imposed exile notwithstanding, Pritchett was from the start an ...

Carousel

Michael Hofmann: Zagajewski’s Charm, 15 December 2005

Selected Poems 
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams.
Faber, 173 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22425 3
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A Defence of Ardour: Essays 
by Adam Zagajewski.
Farrar, Straus, 198 pp., $14, October 2005, 0 374 52988 4
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... spent their brief, uneasy childhoods in clay nests alongside siblings, small, mad planets, black as forest berries. This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries – hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence ...

Indomitable

Terry Eagleton: Marx and Hobsbawm, 3 March 2011

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 
by Eric Hobsbawm.
Little, Brown, 470 pp., £25, January 2011, 978 1 4087 0287 1
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... since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title. Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke ...

Keep quiet about it

Alan Ryan: Henry Sidgwick’s Anxieties, 2 June 2005

Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe 
by Bart Schultz.
Cambridge, 858 pp., £40, June 2004, 0 521 82967 4
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... was the crisis in Anglicanism, and Symonds was in any event one of the unlikelier products of Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol. But the Apostolic practice of unsparing self-analysis and the Apostolic ideal of absolute honesty and openness with one’s intellectual intimates certainly fed into the late Victorian revolt against repression and hypocrisy. It is ...

You have a new memory

Hal Foster: Trevor Paglen, 11 October 2018

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen 
by John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 252 pp., £45, July 2018, 978 1 911282 33 4
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Trevor Paglen 
by Lauren Cornell, Julia This Bryan-Wilson and Omar Kholeif.
Phaidon, 160 pp., £29.95, May 2018, 978 0 7148 7344 2
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... start of the Iraq War; they impelled him to fill in the blank spots on the maps, to register the black sites somehow. Thus Limit Telephotography (2005-present), his series of photographs of remote surveillance systems and clandestine military operations taken with high-powered lenses usually at a great distance (as far as sixty miles away) and often on land ...

Who scored last?

Gavin Francis: Collision Sport, 5 October 2023

Concussed: Sport’s Uncomfortable Truth 
by Sam Peters.
Allen & Unwin, 448 pp., £20, August, 978 1 83895 577 9
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... is I had the best fucking fifteen years of my life.’ Peters quotes the former New Zealand All Black Carl Hayman, talking about his early-onset dementia: ‘I was a commodity, and I understood that … It’s like that scene in [Band of Brothers] when the guy tells the bloke with shell shock: “When you accept you’re dead, you can function as a ...
... language’ have been defined, for at least three centuries, as universal. In France there is no black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
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Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
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... music improved vigilance, mental alertness and working efficiency; in 1972 Black & Decker reported a 1.42 per cent gain in productivity once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two ...

Apoplectic Gristle

David Trotter: Wyndham Lewis, 25 January 2001

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis 
by Paul O'Keeffe.
Cape, 697 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 224 03102 3
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Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer 
by Paul Edwards.
Yale, 583 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 300 08209 6
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... took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master ...

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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... Author​ of the anti-racist jeremiad Black Skin, White Masks; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of post-colonialism; hero to the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the cités: Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance ...

Out of the blue

Mark Ford, 10 December 1987

Meeting the British 
by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 53 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 571 14858 1
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Partingtime Hall 
by James Fenton and John Fuller.
Salamander, 69 pp., £7.50, April 1987, 0 948681 05 5
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Private Parts 
by Fiona Pitt-Kethley.
Chatto, 72 pp., £4.95, June 1987, 9780701132064
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Bright River Yonder 
by John Hartley Williams.
Bloodaxe, 87 pp., £4.95, April 1987, 1 85224 028 8
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... hay-stacks, silage-pits, building-sites, a thatched cottage even – seems to be draped in black polythene and weighted against the wind, like a Christo sculpture. This is prime Muldoon territory – things insulated and concealed inside themselves, the purely random and over-artistic somehow marrying, seeming revelations that lead nowhere-but the ...
Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century 
by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by Richard Veasey.
Harvill, 434 pp., £20, December 1995, 1 86046 035 6
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The Imaginary Jew 
by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff.
Nebraska, 230 pp., £23.95, August 1994, 0 8032 1987 3
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The Defeat of the Mind 
by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Judith Friedlander.
Columbia, 165 pp., $15, May 1996, 0 231 08023 9
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... between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ‘Black’ and ‘African-American’. Suchoff praises Finkielkraut’s ‘paradoxical commitment to ethnicity’, while Friedlander acclaims his shift from ‘minority nationalism’ to ‘the assimilationist ideals long associated with the French ...

Prophetic Chattiness

Patrick McGuinness: Victor Hugo, 19 June 2003

The Distance, The Shadows: Selected Poems 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Harry Guest.
Anvil, 250 pp., £12.95, November 2002, 0 85646 345 0
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Selected Poetry 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Steven Monte.
Carcanet, 305 pp., £12.95, September 2001, 1 85754 539 7
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Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition 
edited by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore.
Chicago, 631 pp., £24.50, April 2001, 0 226 35980 8
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... new and heterogeneous elements, indispensable for the advancement of the poem’s effect’. Benjamin wrote in the Arcades Project that it was as if ‘some law of his poetic nature’ made Hugo ‘stamp every thought with the form of an apotheosis’. His poems, especially the ones conceived on an epic scale, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende ...

Builder of Ruins

Mary Beard: Arthur Evans, 30 November 2000

Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth 
by J.A. MacGillivray.
Cape, 313 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 04352 8
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... It turned out to be a revolutionary appointment. In the face of all kinds of objections from Benjamin Jowett and the like, Evans set about raising money to develop the Ashmolean collection into a research resource for the whole of European archaeology, from prehistory onwards; and he orchestrated its move in 1894 into large new premises behind the ...

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