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‘Look, look, what ails the ship, she is upsetting’

Peter Nichols: The ship ‘Essex’, 8 March 2001

The Loss of the Ship ‘Essex’, Sunk by a Whale 
by Thomas Nickerson and Owen Chase, edited by Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick et al.
Penguin, 231 pp., £7.99, June 2000, 0 14 043796 7
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... with water. The ship began to list to port. With admirable foresight, William Bond, the ship’s black steward, went to the cabins and began to bring up the sea chests belonging to Chase and the Essex’s captain, George Pollard. Each contained quadrants, charts and navigation tables. Chase and his men unlashed the one remaining whaleboat, put the chests in ...

More than a Million Names

Mattathias Schwartz: American Intelligence, 16 June 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 
by Michael Hayden.
Penguin, 464 pp., £21.99, February 2016, 978 1 59420 656 6
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... thoroughness, the Macedonians turned him over to the CIA, which flew him to the ‘Salt Pit’, a black site in Afghanistan. He told his American captors the same thing he’d told the Macedonians: he was an innocent man, a German citizen on vacation. He made a living selling cars. He had no connections to al-Qaida or any other jihadis. After el-Masri had ...

Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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... Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white ...

Unhappy Man

P.N. Furbank, 22 July 1993

The Lives of Michel Foucault 
by David Macey.
Hutchinson, 599 pp., £20, June 1993, 0 09 175344 9
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The Passion of Michel Foucault 
by James Miller.
HarperCollins, 491 pp., £18, June 1993, 0 00 255267 1
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... as a young man, made him ‘universally unpopular’; his odd flashes (not very frequent) of black and frightening anger, and his occasional tetchiness about adverse criticism during his years of fame. He dates the fixing of Foucault’s physical ‘image’, the mad surgeon look, to his time at the University of Tunis in 1966-8; it was then that he ...

Smoking

Norma Kitson, 7 March 1985

... to. There were two desks and a lot of men standing and sitting in the room. Near the window was a black man in the most awful state. He was staggering, wet, and his nose seemed to be bleeding all over his clothes. I closed the door quickly. Feeling I was being followed, I ran down to the door at the very end and opened it. I had a quick glimpse of Dave ...

Fiction and the Poverty of Theory

John Sutherland, 20 November 1986

News from Nowhere 
by David Caute.
Hamish Hamilton, 403 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 241 11920 0
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O-Zone 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 469 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 241 11948 0
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Ticket to Ride 
by Dennis Potter.
Faber, 202 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 9780571145232
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... the Marxist Feminist, Esther the Rhodesian dissident and Liberty the firm-breasted, AK 47-toting black guerrilla. The narrative has lots of sexy bits of the ‘he impaled the warm meat of her loins on his questing finger’ kind. News from Nowhere begins with the 1968 May ‘revolution’ in Paris: a great and blissful moment. It ends with a ...

Sickness and Salvation

Sylvia Lawson, 31 August 1989

Aids and its Metaphors 
by Susan Sontag.
Allen Lane, 95 pp., £9.95, March 1989, 0 7139 9025 2
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The Whole Truth: The Myth of Alternative Health 
by Rosalind Coward.
Faber, 216 pp., £12.99, June 1989, 0 571 14114 5
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... which resonated compatibly with the incipient politics of the decade. Sontag mediated the works of Benjamin, Barthes, Genet, Godard, Resnais, Bresson, Riefenstahl and Canetti to that American audience which listens first to what is spoken from New York. Every essay, in her lively early collections, enacted her declaration of faith in the indissoluble quiddity ...

On Not Getting the Credit

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray, 23 May 2013

Eileen Gray 
Pompidou Centre, 20 February 2013 to 20 May 2013Show More
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... Pompidou gives over a vast and starkly lit vitrine to one of these screens: a wall of 28 hinged black panels that throw elaborate reflections on the gallery floor. She produced a pure black lacquered square to be mounted on a wall like a flat-screen TV in 1915 – the same year as Malevich’s more celebrated ...

Constantly Dangled, Endlessly Receding

Ghada Karmi: Palestinian Rights, 5 December 2019

... respect for human rights.‘I am guided by several principles when it comes to the West Bank,’ Benjamin Netanyahu said at an event this summer to celebrate forty years of the Samaria Regional Council, which governs the settlements. ‘The first: this is our homeland. The second: we will continue to build and develop it. Third: not one resident or community ...

Tremendous in His Wrath

Eric Foner: George Washington, Slave Owner, 19 December 2019

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon 
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January 2019, 978 0 8139 4184 4
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... suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers … a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological justification for slavery, echoed throughout the ...

Rambo v. Rimbaud

Emily Witt: On Justin Torres, 4 April 2024

Blackouts 
by Justin Torres.
Granta, 305 pp., £14.99, November 2023, 978 1 84708 397 5
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... lives that will never be fully known. ‘I prefer the books just as I found them, covered in black,’ Juan says, before introducing the possibility that he might have blacked the passages out himself. ‘Filled with little poems of illumination. A counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr Henry’s agenda.’ The blackouts of the title refer to ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant ...

Ecological Leninism

Adam Tooze: Drill, baby, drill, 18 November 2021

... in Trotskyism, and he now declares himself an ecological Leninist. His co-authors in White Skin, Black Fuel named themselves the Zetkin Collective after the German communist and feminist Clara Zetkin, whose interpretation of fascism they draw on and whose ashes were interred in 1933 beside the Kremlin Wall.Some will accuse Malm of cosplaying revolution ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ‘chosen freedom’ but rather, for the most part, involuntary wartime border-crossers, many of whom had then made the best of their situation by ...

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
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... that charmed him, its combination of photographic realism and fantastic effect, or what Walter Benjamin called the ‘blue flower’ of sensuous immediacy produced through intensive mediation. As a child, Magritte contrived plays and pranks with a gang that included his two younger brothers and assorted neighbourhood pals, and he made home movies for much ...

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