Repeal the 20th Century

William Davies: Pre-MAGA, 25 September 2025

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism 
by John Ganz.
Penguin, 426 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 4059 8169 9
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... of a decade, one worldview was seemingly discredited and another took its place. While historians may baulk at the tidy chronology, the idea that there was during this period a paradigm shift in capitalist regulation has proved seductive, and scholars in many fields have busied themselves describing how the ideological wheel turned. An enormous amount of ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... or shouldn’t be in the lifetime of people mentioned in any way disparagingly. If yes, offence may be caused. If no, they’ve lost the chance to answer back. But if they’re famous, oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it ...

Top Brands Today

Nicholas Penny: The Art World, 14 December 2017

The Auctioneer: A Memoir of Great Art, Legendary Collectors and Record-Breaking Auctions 
by Simon de Pury and William Stadiem.
Allen and Unwin, 312 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 1 76011 350 6
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Rogues’ Gallery: A History of Art and Its Dealers 
by Philip Hook.
Profile, 282 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78125 570 4
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Donald Judd: Writings 
edited by Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray.
David Zwirner, 1054 pp., £28, November 2016, 978 1 941701 35 5
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... the National Gallery in London. There are also new private collectors of Old Masters (Jeff Koons may be one of them). No mention is made of the changing market in ‘Modern’, which has in recent decades expanded to include a reappraisal of ‘Modern British’ – an area in which dealers, curators and collectors practise discrimination of a kind rarely ...

The Pleasures of Poverty

Barbara Everett, 6 September 1984

A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries 
by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £12.95, July 1984, 0 333 34995 4
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... 1977. In that year, two contributors to a Times Literary Supplement survey, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, spoke so highly of her work as to effect a change in this situation. Three more novels by Barbara Pym were published, this time by Macmillan, who finally added to them in 1982 – two years after the writer had herself died – the book originally ...

A Tove on the Table

A.W. Moore: Versions of Wittgenstein, 1 August 2024

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Michael Beaney.
Oxford, 100 pp., £8.99, May 2023, 978 0 19 886137 9
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Alexander Booth.
Penguin, 94 pp., £14.99, December 2023, 978 0 241 68195 4
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls.
Norton, 181 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 324 09243 8
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... page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’It was McGuinness who, in collaboration with David Pears, produced the second English translation, in 1961. But the correspondence with Ogden, in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little ...

Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner, 9 July 2009

Le Monde selon K. 
by Pierre Péan.
Fayard, 331 pp., €19, February 2009, 978 2 213 64372 4
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... In mid-May, as the Sri Lankan army completed its rout of the Tamil Tigers, President Mahinda Rajapaksa described the scorched-earth campaign as ‘an unprecedented humanitarian operation’. Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce ...

The Operatic Theory of History

Paul Seabright: A new Russia, 26 November 1998

Rebirth of a Nation: An Anatomy of Russia 
by John Lloyd.
Joseph, 478 pp., £20, January 1998, 0 7181 3862 7
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Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia 
by David Remnick.
Picador, 412 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 330 36916 4
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... in nine years, falling from 2.2 births per woman in 1987 to 1.3 in 1996. A demographer somewhere may prove me wrong, but I believe this to be the fastest collapse in peacetime fertility in recorded history (less rapid, but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but ...

Feasting on Power

John Upton: David Blunkett’s Criminal Justice Bill, 10 July 2003

... David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables in this country: those accused of committing a crime. It will strip away safeguards that have taken centuries to accrue, and alienate criminal suspects further from society as a whole ...

What sort of Scotland?

Neal Ascherson, 21 August 2014

... there, in a sense.’ ‘Perhaps we should think about Scotland in the same way,’ the playwright David Greig said. ‘Perhaps Scotland has always been independent, but we were just unable to see it.’ Where is Scotland, anyway? That question isn’t about geography. Where does it exist most intensely? In football? In culture? In the past? In its music? The ...

At the Venice Biennale

Alice Spawls: All the World’s Futures, 18 June 2015

... city, the Biennale, in 1895. Selvatico must have known his time was short: construction began in May 1894, only a month after the idea was announced at a meeting of artists and writers at Caffé Florian, starting with the demolition of the Tommaso Meduna riding school, which housed army horses and an elephant called Toni. The proposed site, the Giardini on ...

At the British Museum

Julian Bell: ‘The World of Stonehenge’, 23 June 2022

... have been whorled or studded with consummate finesse, they deflect our questions: ‘Their meaning may have been partly realised by their makers in the time and thought invested in their creation.’Alongside the acts of occupation went acts of orientation: that is the standard claim about the culture of the era – affirmed as much by that vertical band on ...

Stand the baby on its head

John Bayley, 22 July 1993

The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales 
edited by Alison Luire.
Oxford, 455 pp., £17.95, May 1993, 0 19 214218 6
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The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales 
edited by Angela Carter.
Virago, 230 pp., £7.99, July 1993, 1 85381 616 7
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... in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages ...

1966 and all that

Michael Stewart, 20 December 1984

The Castle Diaries. Vol. II: 1964-70 
by Barbara Castle.
Weidenfeld, 848 pp., £20, October 1984, 0 297 78374 2
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... the younger Mrs Castle is a little less prolix: the five and a half years from October 1964 to May 1970 rate only about half a million words – an average daily stint of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal with. Was it all worth it? Though anxious not to give Mrs Castle the ...

Blacks and Blues

E.S. Turner, 4 June 1987

The Life of My Choice 
by Wilfred Thesiger.
Collins, 459 pp., £15, May 1987, 9780002161947
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Worlds Apart: Travels in War and Peace 
by Gavin Young.
Hutchinson, 344 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 09 168220 7
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... what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out ...

Anticipatory Plagiarism

Paul Grimstad: Oulipo, 6 December 2012

Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature 
by Daniel Levin Becker.
Harvard, 338 pp., £19.95, May 2012, 978 0 674 06577 2
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... of influence on the mathematical side. Queneau’s ‘Les Fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert’ treats Hilbert’s claim that instead of points, lines and planes you might just as easily say ‘tables, chairs and beermugs’ as an invitation to make a further move to ‘words, sentences and paragraphs’. Given that aspects of the Hilbert ...