Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... much ground to cover) than the one-volume Oxford Book of French Short Stories (2002), edited by Elizabeth Fallaize, which opens three centuries later and shares half a dozen entries with the Penguin anthology. The forward march of one story per author suggests a canon in the making, or at least a genealogy, but McGuinness has more pluralist emphases in ...

Untold Stories

Alan Bennett, 30 September 1999

... and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched high above her knees, banging her spoon on a tray. But as I turned to go I saw ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to Europe repeatedly during the 19th century, was the ...

The Capitalocene

Benjamin Kunkel: The Anthropocene, 2 March 2017

The Birth of the Anthropocene 
by Jeremy Davies.
California, 240 pp., £24.95, June 2016, 978 0 520 28997 0
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Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital 
by Jason Moore.
Verso, 336 pp., £19.99, August 2015, 978 1 78168 902 8
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Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming 
by Andreas Malm.
Verso, 496 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 78478 129 3
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... thinking just as easily licenses more or less apolitical fatalism. In The Sixth Extinction (2014), Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker concludes a book that for the most part consists of scrupulous reporting on collapsing ecosystems with a foray into speculative anthropology. In the Leipzig bar to which Mephistopheles invites Faust in Goethe’s play, Kolbert ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... in XR’s name refers to rapid species depletion in the Anthropocene – and to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) – but the recurring terms in its lexicon are ‘civilisation’, ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘equality’, ‘politics’ and ‘change’. All XR intellectuals, including Kate Raworth, the ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... Joaquin Castro and his twin brother, Julián, the presidential candidate; Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren and various news anchors. Then he goes to sleep.*As the president is landing in El Paso on his healing mission, 600 ICE agents arrest 680 people, including many who have been in the US for more than a decade, at chicken processing plants in ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... philosophers wrote a letter of protest, as if we should have hoped for better from Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.) What would a government seriously committed to academic freedom ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... husband was out of work, lost her mind and tried to gas her two children. In Lincoln in 1924, Maud Elizabeth-Norman, a 24-year-old former domestic servant, was found guilty of the attempted murder of her newborn. ‘I did it because I was homeless, out of work, and starving, and I could not bear to see the child want. She had been ailing for some time. I could ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... more or less eliminating women from both the class and the cause. It has recently been argued by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Feminism without Illusions that feminism when cultivated as ‘sisterhood’ is in danger of eluding class realities: ‘Sisterhood invokes non-political relations ... In so doing it missed the point ... feminist politics of the ...

You better not tell me you forgot

Terry Castle: How to Spot Members of the Tribe, 27 September 2012

All We Know: Three Lives 
by Lisa Cohen.
Farrar Straus, 429 pp., £22.50, July 2012, 978 0 374 17649 5
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... makes an apt parallel between her sophisticated fashion work in the 1940s and 1950s and Elizabeth David’s ‘postwar education of the English palate’.) Garland became fairly well-to-do along the way: the owner of houses in South Kensington and Shoreham in Kent, both of them graced with art and furnishings by glamorous friends like Marie ...

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... you on the highways and byways. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.’ Or Elizabeth Smith, the Scottish-born wife of a Wicklow landlord: ‘The Irish landlord is in no essential different from the Irish peasant – his superior position has raised him in many points above his labouring countryman but the character of this race is ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... and dark is the abyss of the theatre.’ On the night his play closed James wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins: ‘It has been a great relief to feel that one of the most detestable incidents of my life has closed.’ On 22 February he wrote to his brother: ‘Oscar Wilde’s farce which followed Guy Domville is, I believe, a great success – and with ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... makes it immaterial. In an enchanting piece in the People in 1950, a New Zealand journalist called Elizabeth Parsons quizzed ‘Britain’s three most eligible bachelors’ about what they might be looking for in a wife. The bachelors are Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell. Parsons catches Novello in his dressing room applying his make-up ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... biography, in circumstances that are severally illuminating.In November 1933, writing to Elizabeth Bowen, he advanced in capsule form his two chief propositions or preoccupations: I quote Ignatieff’s summary:The philosopher Malebranche had observed that since the moral ends which human beings commonly pursued were in conflict with each other, the ...