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A Diagram of Power in the Arab World

Michael Gilsenan, 2 October 1997

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism 
by Abdellah Hammoudi.
Chicago, 195 pp., £30.50, September 1997, 0 226 31527 4
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... Though he does not use the same terms, his interrogations seem to me to be cousin to those of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Jacqueline Rose in State of Fantasy: how are Arab communities and nations imagined? What are the fantasies that are constitutive of their different political and social identities? And in the shadows hovers the great ...

When Medicine Failed

Barbara Newman: Saints, 7 May 2015

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation 
by Robert Bartlett.
Princeton, 787 pp., £27.95, December 2013, 978 0 691 15913 3
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... displays a happy balance between scholarship and readability. Its directness shows that Bartlett read Augustine in Latin (cur et mortui tanta possunt?) – the published translations are much wordier. Bartlett identifies the three essentials for a saint cult as ‘name, body, text’. Names might be confused and texts could be commissioned, but a body, or at ...

Lola did the driving

Inigo Thomas: Pevsner’s Suffolk, 5 May 2016

Suffolk: East, The Buildings of England 
by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Yale, 677 pp., £35, April 2015, 978 0 300 19654 2
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... in the Suffolk volumes – and the rest of the BoE – is hard to gauge, but much of what you read about you can’t easily see. The gatehouse to what was once Butley Priory is one example. The guide doesn’t tell you that it can be rented: it sleeps 11 and costs £900 a night (the pictures on the priory’s website show interiors of light stone and ...

When did your eyes open?

Benjamin Nathans: Sakharov, 13 May 2010

Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov 
by Jay Bergman.
Cornell, 454 pp., £24.95, October 2009, 978 0 8014 4731 0
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... much of the USSR’s history. But we should bear in mind, to paraphrase the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, that the last thing a talking fish would be likely to mention is the water in which it swims. A particularly striking example of Bergman’s tendency to discount the Soviet context appears in his otherwise insightful analysis of Sakharov’s Reflections ...

Qatrina and the Books

Amit Chaudhuri: What is Pakistani Writing?, 27 August 2009

The Wasted Vigil 
by Nadeem Aslam.
Faber, 436 pp., £7.99, June 2009, 978 0 571 23880 4
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... the non-West is, or at least was, nicely encompassed by ‘national’, in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the word. The ‘book’ has been a crucial element in the unfolding of that history; after the banning of The Satanic Verses, and the book-burnings and desecrations that followed, at the hands of fundamentalists of all ...

Demonising Nationalism

Tom Nairn, 25 February 1993

... subtlety is needed to decode the image, since a closer look shows the teeth inside the gash read simply ‘Nationalism’. But in case anyone failed to register that, the whole image was crowned with a title in 72-point scarlet lettering: ‘OLD DEMON’. It wasn’t an in-depth retrospect – it hardly could have been at that date – more an ...

In the Waiting-Room of History

Amit Chaudhuri: ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’, 24 June 2004

Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference 
by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Princeton, 320 pp., £42.95, October 2000, 0 691 04908 4
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... was first made, on the publication of Chatterjee’s first novel, Chatterjee claimed he’d never read Scott. Even if he had, to call him the ‘Walter Scott of Bengal’ is subtly different from, say, Barthes remarking, ‘Gide was another Montaigne,’ where a continuity is being established, a lineage being traced. In the phrase that describes ...

The View from the Top

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Upland Anarchists, 2 December 2010

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 442 pp., £16.99, January 2011, 978 0 300 16917 1
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... quite different figures in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre state’, ‘agricultural involution’ and quite a few others, which then ...

How to Write It

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: India after Independence, 20 September 2007

India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy 
by Ramachandra Guha.
Macmillan, 900 pp., £25, April 2007, 978 0 230 01654 5
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The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Belknap, 403 pp., £19.95, June 2007, 978 0 674 02482 3
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... modern national histories since its publication thirty years ago. Its long shadow falls even on Benedict Anderson’s account of the way print capitalism helped create the ‘imagined communities’ that are today’s nation-states. No such master account has yet been written of the modern Indian nation-state, partly because historians of the subcontinent ...

Imagined Territories

Yonatan Mendel: Designing the Occupation, 2 August 2007

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation 
by Eyal Weizman.
Verso, 318 pp., £19.99, June 2007, 978 1 84467 125 0
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... time, achieved a kind of reality consistent with its ambitions, in what might – borrowing from Benedict Anderson – be thought of as its ‘Imagined Territories’. Israel’s insistence on building in the Occupied Territories forced it to take into account the existence of Palestinian villages and roads but as Weizman shows, Israeli ‘architects’ had ...

Did you hear about Mrs Binh?

Adam Mars-Jones: Viet Thanh Nguyen, 18 May 2017

The Refugees 
by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Corsair, 209 pp., £12.99, February 2017, 978 1 4721 5255 8
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... rose, when it was his habit to give her improving books rather than romantic ones, books she never read although she appreciated the elegant calligraphy of his inscriptions on the title pages. She’s not impressed by the rose, understanding that true love isn’t about such things but about ‘going to work every day and never once complaining about teaching ...

The Wrong Head

Mike Jay: Am I Napoleon?, 21 May 2015

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Towards a Political History of Madness 
by Laure Murat, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Chicago, 288 pp., £31.50, October 2014, 978 0 226 02573 5
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... with dreams the tendency to be either beyond comprehension or all too obvious in meaning. When we read that in January 1818 two women were admitted separately to Charenton ‘entirely deranged’ by the price of bread and the fear that they could no longer feed their children, the connection between reality and delusion comes ready-made. At other times the ...

Even Now

Neal Ascherson: The Silence of Günter Grass, 2 November 2006

Beim Häuten der Zwiebel 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 480 pp., €24, September 2006, 3 86521 330 8
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... Joseph, the pious Bavarian, who had grown up to become Cardinal Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, appalled the Muslim world and many liberal Catholics by quoting a Byzantine emperor’s insults to the Prophet Muhammad. The Danzig lad, who had become Germany’s best-known writer and a Nobel Prize winner, the scourge of those who kept quiet about ...

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an actor; and Vanessa Shaw, a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd ...

The Punishment of Margaret Mead

Marilyn Strathern, 5 May 1983

Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth 
by Derek Freeman.
Harvard, 379 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 674 54830 2
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... for dominant patterns. Here she was developing a mode laid out by others – not-ably by Ruth Benedict following Boas, both of whose influence on Mead’s work Freeman describes in detail. She was very good at it, although the approach is not one that would be adopted now, and perhaps it was collapse of interest in dominant cultural patterns which more ...

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