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Into the Dark

Kathleen Jamie: A Winter Solstice, 18 December 2003

... a girl with a hand-knit tourie. Throughout the boat, muzak was playing. Old Christmas hits. Paul McCartney. The only place you could avoid it was a lounge with subdued lighting and big reclining chairs. There were prints on the walls, a set of three, showing a cartoon sea with a stripy lighthouse, a fishing-boat, and below the blue waves, three ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... cries Louie … confessing to his young son the shabby sexual adventure that he engaged in as she lay on her deathbed: ‘That may mean, will mean, little or nothing to you, my only child, reading this document.’ To Bellow, it meant everything. Again, the stylistic equivalent of an operatic curtain, coming down grandly on a fiasco. Used in a context as ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women ...

Singing the Blues

Noël Annan, 22 April 1993

A History of Cambridge University. Vol. IV: 1870-1990 
by Christopher Brooke.
Cambridge, 652 pp., £50, December 1992, 9780521343503
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... replaced by the editors of Granta and Varsity, who had an eye on Fleet Street and were keener on lay-out than content, and by producers and actors determined to storm the RSC. He writes with sense and sensitivity of the student unrest which, in the Sixties and early Seventies, changed the relations between dons and undergraduates. But does he not think it ...

From Soixante-Huit to Soixante-Neuf

Glen Newey: Slack-Sphinctered Pachyderm, 29 April 1999

Collected Papers: Technology, War and Fascism 
by Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner.
Routledge, 278 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 415 13780 2
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The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust 
by Norman Geras.
Verso, 181 pp., £15, June 1998, 1 85984 868 0
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... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...

Nazi Votes

David Blackbourn, 1 November 1984

The Nazi Machtergreifung 
edited by Peter Stachura.
Allen and Unwin, 191 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 04 943026 2
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Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis 1929-35 
by Conan Fischer.
Allen and Unwin, 239 pp., £20, June 1983, 0 04 943028 9
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The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945 
by Michael Kater.
Blackwell, 415 pp., £22.50, August 1983, 0 631 13313 5
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Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933 
by Eve Rosenhaft.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £24, August 1983, 9780521236386
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... terrible simplificateur, a Hitler writ small. Kater also introduces us to travelling salesman Paul Gillgasch, who struggled to pay his district party’s telephone bills from the sale of razor blades and portraits of the Führer. This is the familiar world of the Spiesser. But Kater also shows that, especially in the years 1930-33, the Nazis started to ...

Blumsday

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 3 November 1983

Léon Blum 
by Jean Lacouture, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 571 pp., $39.50, October 1982, 0 8419 0775 7
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... sons and the mother in iconographical terms remarkably close to those prevailing in Catholic or lay families of the period. France may have been superficially divided, but it was, without knowing it, an anthropological whole united at the level of its middle classes by the shared outlook of its bourgeois families. Young Léon attended the Ecole ...

Small Items with Big Implications

John Hedley Brooke, 1 December 1983

Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Norton, 413 pp., £11.95, September 1983, 0 393 01716 8
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The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology, 1814-1849 
by Nicolaas Rupke.
Oxford, 322 pp., £22.50, September 1983, 0 19 822907 0
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... explained, ‘could not have answered the purpose of a habitable world’. The answer, in fact, lay in the soil, so necessary for the growth of plants. But the same processes of erosion which produced soil from mountains would in time destroy the land. Accordingly, if the world was the work of ‘infinite power and wisdom’ there had to be restorative ...

Warhol’s Respectability

Nicholas Penny, 19 March 1987

The Revenge of the Philistines 
by Hilton Kramer.
Secker, 445 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 436 23687 7
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Gilbert and George 
by Carter Ratcliff.
Thames and Hudson, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 500 27443 6
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British Art in the 20th Century 
edited by Susan Compton.
Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 460 pp., £16.90, January 1987, 3 7913 0798 3
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... on modern art. One is the earnest social aspirations and concern for the environment which lay behind such developments as Land art, Performance art, Living sculpture, Body art and Community art. Kramer is unimpressed by Robert Smithson’s ‘ambition ... to break with the conventions of studio production and museum exhibitions in order to create an ...

Elegy for an Anarchist

George Woodcock, 19 January 1984

... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...

Greatest Happiness

Brian Barry, 19 January 1984

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Vol. I: Cambridge Essays 1888-1899 
edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew Brink, Nicholas Griffin, Richard Rempel and John Slater.
Allen and Unwin, 554 pp., £48, November 1983, 0 04 920067 4
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... by a lot of in-group facetiousness at the start. Although G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica still lay four years in the future, Russell had available to him the typescript of some lectures that Moore had given in London during the previous year on ‘The Elements of Ethics’. In his paper he takes issue with Moore’s view that there can be good or bad ...

John Homer’s Odyssey

Claude Rawson, 9 January 1992

Customs in Common 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin, 547 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 85036 411 6
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... Another such issue is whether 18th-century England may properly be called, as in the title of Paul Langford’s recent book, ‘a polite and commercial people’: a title which draws from Thompson the observation that ‘historical conferences on 18th-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the bland.’ It’s hard nowadays to think of ...

Gravel in Jakarta’s Shoes

Benedict Anderson, 2 November 1995

Generations of Resistance 
by Steve Cox and Peter Carey.
Cassell, 120 pp., £55, November 1995, 9780304332502
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... a stable majority for integration. The appearance of outside visitors, most notably Pope John Paul in late 1989, gave the East Timorese the sense that they had not been forgotten by the outside world, and increasingly they found opportunities to communicate with it. For the first time they began to organise demonstrations for independence, which, though ...

White Sheep at Rest

Neal Ascherson: After Culloden, 12 August 2021

Culloden: Battle & Aftermath 
by Paul O’Keeffe.
Bodley Head, 432 pp., £25, January, 978 1 84792 412 4
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... one of Cumberland’s officers remarked, ‘but it was vain, they could not penetrate, and lay in Heaps.’ This ‘macabre deadlock’, as O’Keeffe calls it, lasted for perhaps half an hour before government reinforcements arrived to tip the balance. The Jacobite survivors of the crossfire began to retreat and then to run. On the left of the ...

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov: Surveillance Technology, 5 April 2012

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance 
by Kelly Gates.
NYU Press, 261 pp., £15.99, March 2011, 978 0 8147 3210 6
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... The work of Alphonse Bertillon, a police official working in Paris from the 1880s onwards, helped lay the ground for modern FRT. Unlike the eugenicist Francis Galton or the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed it was possible to read a person’s criminal type off his face, Bertillon was mundanely preoccupied with identifying criminals by recording ...

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