Christopher Prendergast

Christopher Prendergast is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Letter

On War and Intervention

20 February 2003

Conor Gearty and David Ramsbotham refer to ‘pre-emptive war’ in their respective accounts of the Iraq crisis. The matter is complicated however by the reference to ‘preventive’ war in a text by Michael Quinlan quoted by Gearty. Is there some confusion here between two distinct doctrines? As I have been given to understand it, the justification of ‘pre-emptive war’ rests on the belief, beyond...
Letter

Boggs the Forger

6 June 2002

I wonder how Terry Eagleton’s argument on the topic of forgery, counterfeiting and plagiarism (LRB, 6 June) would stand to the intriguing case of the currency-artist, J.S.G. Boggs. Some fifteen years ago, Boggs produced a series of facsimiles of the US dollar in various denominations but on one side of the paper only. He then used them to trade, not as pretend legal tender but as works of art, in...
Letter

11 September

4 October 2001

Marjorie Perloff (Letters, 18 October) is moderately well known as an academic literary critic particularly gifted in the skills of close reading. Her comprehensively illiterate comments on the round-table ‘Reflections on the Present Crisis’ suggest that this time round she must have been reading with her eyes shut. The premise of her intervention (that, ‘with a few exceptions’, the round-table...
Letter

Saving Masud Khan

22 February 2001

In her response to Wynne Godley’s story (Letters, 22 March), Kirsty Hall appears to confuse ‘true’ with ‘real’. There can be no doubt that Godley’s states of mind at the time of his analysis with Masud Khan were real, but it is clear that they did not constitute the ‘truth’ of Wynne Godley (other than in the merely tautologous sense that it is true that at the time these were real states...
Letter

Moretti gets it right

23 May 1996

George Steiner, while charitable to a number of its local insights, takes a somewhat dismal view of the general worth of Franco Moretti’s recent book, Modern Epic (LRB, 23 May). I take a very different view. That is clearly a matter of opinion. But what will not do is to give an account of the book that is in many ways misleading, mainly by omission. Thus, Steiner begins his review by rehearsing...

Pieces about Christopher Prendergast in the LRB

All the world’s a spy novel: What Didn’t Happen

Michael Wood, 30 July 2020

Why is luck good or bad, an incentive to gambling, while chance seems weirdly neutral? And what was it like in the old days when Fortune played a larger role in ordinary consciousness, taking up quite...

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The Thing: Versions of Proust

Michael Wood, 6 January 2005

What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...

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Unreal City

Michael Wood, 7 October 1993

Baudelaire’s city is swarming with people and full of dreams, a place of daylight ghosts. Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves Où le spectre, en plein jour,...

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I am a Cretan

Patrick Parrinder, 21 April 1988

The story goes that, on the day when William Empson moved into Magdalene College, Cambridge, to take up a fellowship, his suitcases (as was the custom in those days) were unpacked by one of the...

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