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Uncleanness

Robert Alter: Reading Leviticus anthropologically, 3 March 2005

Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation 
by Mary Douglas.
Oxford, 211 pp., £45, November 2004, 0 19 926523 2
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... assembled and from which they are forbidden to go out; the lower slopes of the mountain, to which Aaron and the seventy elders are permitted to ascend and where they share a sacred feast in God’s presence; and the summit of the mountain, where Moses alone may go. Douglas proposes three sets of correspondences to this paradigmatic tripartite structure. The ...

Competition is for losers

David Runciman: Silicon Valley Vampire, 23 September 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power 
by Max Chafkin.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 5266 1955 6
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... of world-changing talent. It’s true that he put $500,000 into Facebook when the company was worth barely ten times that: in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, Thiel is portrayed as the ruthless suit who realises that the business is one corporate restructure away from hitting the big time. (In Mike Judge’s Silicon ...

Out Hunting

Gary Younge: In Baltimore, 29 July 2021

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City 
by Justin Fenton.
Faber, 335 pp., £14.99, February, 978 0 571 35661 4
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... wanted a good lawyer: the police officers had even taken his Breitling Navitimer watch which was worth $4000. Jenkins concluded that without Holloway’s help Stevenson wouldn’t be able to afford a decent lawyer, so he tried to break up their marriage by writing her a note that purported to be from a woman pregnant with Stevenson’s child. It didn’t ...

The Inevitable Pit

Stephen Greenblatt: Isn’t that a Jewish name?, 21 September 2000

... and Mendele Mocher Sforim. But they evidently did not feel that the language was a link to a place worth remembering or to a culture worth preserving. My parents, as far as I can tell, were never curious about the place from which their parents had come, and after the war they felt active revulsion. To Yiddish culture, they ...

Spray it silver

Jenny Diski, 2 July 2015

... that long for this world, it seems, but it’s hard to pinpoint how or when. The full lifetime’s worth of radiotherapy I was blasted with inflamed the fibrosis far more than was expected, but the chemotherapy, a horrible experience in itself, seems to have stopped the development of the tumour. Now I’m more likely to die from fibrosis than cancer, which ...

Wilderness of Tigers

Michael Neill: Shakespeare’s Latin, 19 March 2015

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 281 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 0 19 968479 3
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... recall the other face of Saturn, that of the god who devoured his own children; and the murderous Aaron draws attention to the dangerously ‘saturnine’ temperament of those who, like himself, live under the influence of the planet of melancholy; but the play explicitly remembers the Golden Age when a despairing Titus invokes Astraea, the goddess of justice ...

White Hat/Black Hat

Frances Richard: 20th-Century Art, 6 April 2006

Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism 
by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
Thames and Hudson, 704 pp., £45, March 2005, 0 500 23818 9
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... tautologically, as ‘Theory’. Somewhere along the line, art history majors with professors worth their salt will encounter, severally or federated, the critics Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. This quartet have been working together since the 1970s, and are currently co-editors of the journal October. Founded in ...

Each Cornflake

Ben Lerner: Knausgaard, Vol. 3, 22 May 2014

My Struggle: Vol. 3. Boyhood Island 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 490 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 1 84655 722 4
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... is, after all, one way ‘to bring order into the sum of experience’. Here I think it’s worth quoting a famous passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’: A man … who died at 35 will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of 35 … the ‘meaning’ of their life is revealed only in their ...

Elective Outsiders

Jeremy Harding, 3 July 1997

Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology 
edited by Iain Sinclair.
Picador, 488 pp., £9.99, June 1996, 0 330 33135 3
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Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne 
by N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge.
Liverpool, 196 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 85323 840 5
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Carl Rakosi: Poems 1923-41 
edited by Andrew Crozier.
Sun & Moon, 209 pp., $12.99, August 1995, 1 55713 185 6
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The Objectivists 
edited by Andrew McAllister.
Bloodaxe, 156 pp., £8.95, May 1996, 1 85224 341 4
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... from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why Sinclair gives the impression of his poets as a ship of fools docking for an open day. ‘The work I value is that which seems most remote, alienated, fractured. I don’t claim to ...

Blue Suede Studies

Hugh Barnes, 19 December 1985

Elvis and Me 
by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and Sandra Harman.
Century, 320 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 7126 1131 2
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Are you lonesome tonight? 
by Alan Bleasdale.
Faber, 95 pp., £3.95, September 1985, 0 571 13732 6
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Elvis and Gladys 
by Elaine Dundy.
Weidenfeld, 353 pp., £12.95, April 1985, 9780297782100
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The Johnny Cash Discography 
by John Smith.
Greenwood, 203 pp., £29.95, May 1985, 0 313 24654 8
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Horse’s Neck 
by Pete Townshend.
Faber, 95 pp., £6.95, May 1985, 9780571138739
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Like Punk Never Happened 
by Dave Rimmer.
Faber, 191 pp., £4.95, October 1985, 0 571 13739 3
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Starlust: The Secret Fantasies of Fans 
by Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel.
Comet, 253 pp., £4.95, August 1985, 0 86379 004 6
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The Beatles 
by Hunter Davies.
Cape, 498 pp., £12.95, December 1985, 0 224 02837 5
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... the Wars of Independence and finally settled in the district of Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Aaron was born 150 years later. Elvis and Gladys promises much it cannot deliver, nestling uncomfortably between common sense and intuition. But Dundy can be dashing at times. Her description of garage bands in Memphis – where the Presleys moved in search of ...

The Biggest Rockets

Alex Ross: Gustav Mahler, 24 August 2000

Gustav Mahler. Vol. III. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904 to 1907) 
by Henry-Louis de La Grange.
Oxford, 1024 pp., £35, February 1999, 9780193151604
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The Mahler Companion 
edited by Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson.
Oxford, 652 pp., £50, May 1999, 0 19 816376 2
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... of Modernism in terms usually reserved for the producers of Hollywood blockbusters, but it is worth bearing in mind that just before Schoenberg discovered atonality he wrote Gurrelieder, the splashiest Wagno-Mahlerian spectacular of them all. For a while, composers were competing to see who could end a work with the most deafeningly over-orchestrated ...

How good is it?

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Inside the KJB, 3 February 2011

The Holy Bible: King James Version, 1611 Text 
edited by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 1552 pp., £50, October 2010, 978 0 19 955760 8
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Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 
by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 354 pp., £16.99, October 2010, 978 0 19 955759 2
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The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today 
by David Norton.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 521 61688 1
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The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences 
edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones.
Cambridge, 364 pp., £25, December 2010, 978 0 521 76827 6
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Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language 
by David Crystal.
Oxford, 327 pp., £14.99, September 2010, 978 0 19 958585 4
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... will hear it repeated to distraction in this quatercentenary year. If one wonders whether it’s worth telling again, well, like the KJB itself, it sells, and good luck to publishers who turn an honest penny by it. This is the Bible which I was brought up to call the Authorised Version – in my parson’s-son sophistication, rather looking down on Americans ...

Freud’s Idols

Adam Phillips, 27 September 1990

... the religion of his fathers, but that wouldn’t necessarily place him, a man of science, in Aaron’s party, having to withstand ‘the angry scorn of the hero’s glance’. In this context perhaps, if you are not a Jew you are an idolator, but what are Freud’s ‘illusory idols’ whom he creeps cautiously out of the church to return to? It would be ...

Pallas

R.W. Johnson, 7 July 1988

The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy 
by Tom Nairn.
Radius, 402 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 09 172960 2
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... wedding delightedly telling the media about how Fergie had smiled and ‘that smile was worth all the rest of it!’ Or Ken Livingstone, after a brief handshake with the Queen: ‘I have always thought that the Queen is a very nice person indeed. Today confirmed that view.’ As Nairn points out, our Ken ‘had no basis whatever for this observation ...

‘A Dubai on the Mediterranean’

Sara Roy: Trapped in Gaza, 3 November 2005

... the West Bank has lost a potential income of approximately $6.4 billion and suffered $3.5 billion worth of physical damage at the hands of the Israeli army. This means, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, that the ‘occupied Palestinian territory has lost at least one fifth of its economic base over the last four years as a consequence ...

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