Jonathan Rée

Jonathan Rée’s books include Proletarian Philosophers, Witcraft and A Schoolmaster’s War.

Letter

One of His Tricks

27 July 2023

Jenny Turner reports that Fleur Jaeggy wrote an Italian translation of Thomas De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant (LRB, 27 July). It’s worth noting that the opium eater was playing one of his tricks: Last Days is a plagiarised version of a German work published in 1804 by Kant’s last amanuensis, Ehregott Andreas Wasianski.
Letter
In his piece on resistance movements in the Second World War, Malcolm Gaskill mistakenly refers to my father, Harry Rée, as a ‘Lancashire schoolmaster’ (LRB, 7 July). In fact he trained at the Institute in London and was just embarking on his second year as a teacher in Beckenham when he joined up. And he can hardly have spoken French with a Mancunian accent: he was born in Manchester, but...
Letter

Mischief-Making

14 January 2002

A decent history of British culture in the second half of the 20th century, if it is ever written, will include a chapter or two on the vitality of the polytechnics from their creation in 1972 to their conversion into universities twenty years later. And while it is poignant, at least for me, to read what my old boss (Letters, 7 February) and my old union negotiator (Letters, 21 February) have to say...
Letter

On a Chinese Mountain

20 November 1986

SIR: A.M. Ludovici called himself ‘pro-feminine’ and jeered irascibly at ‘the quack-cure of feminism’ with its ‘ideal of complete emancipation from the thraldom of sex’, and at the ‘monorchid and shallow-minded men’ who had ‘gone over’ to it. ‘Ludovici was also a feminist,’ says Frank Kermode. Also? Not so.

Harry Rée wanted his British audience to understand that the French men and women who had taken part in the Resistance were not superhuman. ‘What I shall try to get across,’ he told a symposium in...

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Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices...

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Thou shalt wage class war

Gareth Stedman Jones, 1 November 1984

Sometime in the late Sixties, I was invited, along with some senior socialist historians, to meet Bill Craik, a veteran and pioneer, so I was told, of independent working-class education. The...

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