David Simpson

David Simpson teaches at the University of California, Davis. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger will appear from Chicago later this year.

Let me establish my credentials. On page 320, Bill Clinton recalls a happy time in Montana in 1985 watching ‘marmosets scramble around above the snow line’ (he means marmots). And on page 808 (we’re up to 1998), he identifies the secretary of state for Northern Ireland as Mo Mowlan (for Mowlam). In other words, I have read My Life, all of it, closely enough to catch two...

Letter
Lewis Harvey is right to call attention to the bizarre implications of airbrushing the Abu Ghraib photographs (Letters, 3 June). On the one hand, interviews with tortured prisoners have made it very clear that nakedness before others and their cameras is a source of deep shame, and publishing unedited images could only make this worse: this is the best of the reasons given for not releasing the other...

“Back in November 2003, Sergeant Georg Andreas Pogorny faced the possibility of being court-martialled for cowardice after he’d panicked at the sight of an Iraqi cut in half by machine-gun fire. Pogorny was overcome with what he described as ‘an overwhelming sense of my own mortality’. The most troubling implication of this story is that it appears to be untypical. Few of us in the homeland are given any materials for imagining ourselves in the place and body of the other, a place where in so many ways we already are: this is the real symmetry between 9/11 then and Iraq today.”

In the opening sentences of his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes signalled his own modernity with a withering dismissal of the ancients, whose defects he found ‘nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions’, writings so ‘meagre and for the most part so implausible’ that he could only write as if ‘I were considering a...

Letter

Not so Trivial

3 April 2003

Martin Harries’s websmanship is duly acknowledged (Letters, 8 May): about 853,000 websites linking ‘tragedy’ to 11 September! I’ll wager that few if any of them propose a serious definition or theory of tragedy, first because so many of the dead are deemed to have been ordinary, hence those New York Times obituaries; and then because the ‘foreknowledge of death’ clause applies so unignorably...

As a colleague of David Simpson at the University of California and a friend graciously thanked in his acknowledgments, can I pretend to have the disinterestedness necessary to write an objective...

Read more reviews

Vanishings

Peter Swaab, 20 April 1989

Wordsworth’s poetry has been able to animate critical writing, relevantly, from several different points of view. Narratologists have discussed the gaps in his storytelling and the...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences