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After the British Library Cyberattack

Robert Crawford, 4 April 2024

... for AliceThus all the books on any given subject are found standing together, and no additions or changes ever separate them.Melvil Dewey, A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a LibraryIrishFormal PeopleWaitressing for GodotGirl with Green ThighsA Farewell to ArmaghScottishA Drunk Man Licks at the ThistleTed GauntletSunset SnogFife: A User’s ManualCookbooksMoll FlanBuns and LoversOblomangeTart of DarknessMedicalThe IlliadRosencrantz and Guildenstern Are DeafGays’ AnatomyThe Scarlet PimpleTravelVenice: The MenaceMiddle GiddingLeaves of GrazThe Descent of ManchesterMedievalGaudy KnightThe Brompton Folding Mystery CycleD ...

Brooke’s Benefit

Anthony Powell, 16 April 1981

... M. de Charlus first grasps that the ex-tailor, Jupien, is homosexual, and himself gets to grips. Matthew Arnold, usually accurate in his botany, slips up by calling the convolvulus blue, though he corrected that to pink in later editions of the poem. Keats, admittedly unable to see what flowers were at his feet, nor what soft incense hung upon the ...
... and, in increasing numbers, by women. If the traditional objection to ‘men of letters’ was, as Matthew Arnold put it, that ‘they did not know enough,’ the objection to the new professional critics is that they know too much, and that their knowledge can only be imparted to a trained, disciplined readership. Whether this readership amounts to a ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... Derrida published a vast essay in praise of Levinas, ingeniously framed by two quotations: Matthew Arnold on Hebraism and Hellenism, and ‘Jewgreek is greekjew’ from Ulysses. Thanks to Derrida’s abiding loyalty and sincere flattery, Levinas suddenly found himself hoisted to a position among the celebrities of Parisian post-structuralism ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
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... off’ not just against Auden, but also against Donne, George Herbert, Hopkins, Yeats, Hardy, Matthew Arnold and Frost). You might think of this as a talent for adaptability. In The Buried Day Day Lewis is frank about the ‘incipient hero-worship’ of his youth, and recalls that ‘I possessed certain qualities which would make it fairly easy for ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... jungle,’ Eliot reflected urbanely in a lecture delivered at Harvard. Poets were defined not, as Matthew Arnold might have said, by their high culture but on the contrary by their ability to keep alive a taproot connection with pre-civilised modes of consciousness, so that, as Eliot put it, ‘hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than ...

You have £2000, I have a kidney

Glen Newey: Morals and Markets, 21 June 2012

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets 
by Michael Sandel.
Allen Lane, 244 pp., £20, April 2012, 978 1 84614 471 4
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How Much Is Enough?: The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life 
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 1 84614 448 6
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... people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a capitalistic ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Fastsellers, 22 March 2001

... in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of year to be topping the charts. A week later, as ...

Tomorrow it’ll all be over

Nicholas Spice: The Trouble with Philip Roth’s ‘Everyman’, 25 May 2006

Everyman 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 182 pp., £10, May 2006, 0 224 07869 0
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... by thoughts of death. Phoebe is rapturous at the beauty of the night, but for him, as for Matthew Arnold on Dover Beach, the ‘dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars’, speaks of eternal nothingness: The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards ...

Mothers and Others

Nicholas Spice: Coetzee’s Multistorey Consciousness, 7 March 2024

‘The Pole’ and Other Stories 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 255 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 78730 405 5
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... cognate with theirs. His universe is not without Value, and he cannot give up on the Good. Like Matthew Arnold, spooked by the melancholy long withdrawing roar of the ocean, he still holds to the ideal of being true to one another. It’s not that the injunction ‘only connect’ is meaningless, just that in practice it proves so difficult. In ...

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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... ashamed of having written’. As Auberon Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to Matthew Arnold in Westminster Abbey was cut short by a letter from the Dean informing him that there already was one, ‘I am still sure that there is a point to be made, even if I am no longer quite so sure what it is.’ Besides, there is now, whatever ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... Nicholas Murray Butler, who had read admiring reviews in England of Trilling’s first book, on Matthew Arnold. At that same time, Harry Levin, somewhat younger than Trilling, was teaching in the Harvard English Department, where he had been a famously brilliant student and where he was clearly destined for tenure. In 1940 Bellow’s friend Delmore ...
... philosophise in their works, but also the Victorian ‘slice of life’ theory still admitted by Matthew Arnold, and later, permissive notions of the novel as a ‘spongy tract’ (Forster) or large loose bag into which anything would fit. Obviously novels of the old, discredited schools – the historical novel, the novel of adventure, the soap-box or ...

In theory

Christopher Ricks, 16 April 1981

... of the fact that the word ‘principles’ sounds modest and practicable. Hartman, who rebukes Matthew Arnold for deprecating French thought, says sternly that ‘concepts of national character are dangerous or comic,’ but proceeds immediately to ignore the danger and the comedy: ‘but this Anglo-American conservatism ...’ In fact, he has all ...

Settings

Ronald Blythe, 24 January 1980

A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature 
by Margaret Drabble.
Thames and Hudson, 133 pp., £10.50, October 1980, 0 500 01219 9
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... is Dickens’s hell? Where is the social realism in Crabbe’s ‘Tales’ or Mrs Gaskell’s or Arnold Bennett’s novels? In men and women and angels and demons? No, in places. We move about in these little islands according to the statements listed in a double gazetteer: one from the AA, and the other begun by Celts and Saxons, or even by Romans, for ...

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