Remember Me

John Bossy: Hamlet, 24 May 2001

Hamlet in Purgatory 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Princeton, 322 pp., £19.95, May 2001, 0 691 05873 3
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... the air of over-interpretation. All these turn up again in Hamlet in Purgatory, but altogether do more to enlighten than to confuse. Perhaps this is because the intellectual shell which enclosed Renaissance Self-Fashioning has dropped away: the faith in progressive authorities from Marx to Lacan and the Fathers of Past and Present; in the middle class as an ...

From the Other Side

David Drew, 1 August 1985

... of the day have been an inordinately long and dangerous journey; for Bloch it was surely no more demanding than the one that had taken him, on numberless youthful occasions, from his family home in the industrial port of Ludwigshafen to the old Palatinate capital of Mannheim on the opposite side of the Rhine. The fairgrounds and circuses and amusement ...

Is writing bad for you?

Frank Kermode, 21 February 1991

Writer’s Block 
by Zachary Leader.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £19.50, January 1991, 0 8018 4032 5
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... Writer’s block must be thought of as a disease even more specific to a particular occupation than housemaid’s knee or weaver’s bottom. You can have those without being a housemaid or a weaver, but you can’t have writer’s block without being a writer, and a real writer, meaning one who is known at some stage to have written something of substance ...

On Aetna’s Top

Howard Erskine-Hill, 4 September 1980

The Poetry of Abraham Cowley 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 162 pp., £10, September 1979, 0 333 24167 3
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... The first is Eliot’s hypothesis of a 17th-century dissociation of sensibility, here given a more specific formulation in Hobbes’s distinction between locutionary and propositional truth. The second is a Romantic concept of revolution as creative upheaval. The third is a more recent notion of the exhaustion of ...

Space Snooker

Chris Lintott, 20 October 2022

... the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying ...

Cutting it short

John Bayley, 3 November 1983

Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny, translated by Walter Arndt.
Stanford, 545 pp., $38.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1142 9
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The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny.
Stanford, 386 pp., $32.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1143 7
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... avoiding everything about it that was not ‘meaning’. Pushkin’s solution was plainer, opener, more sybilline and yet more emphatic. He would take matters to the point at which the reader could take over. Above all, he would have no facile, sentimental or melodramatic endings, no suicides for love or honour, no stock ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...

To Stir up the People

John Barrell: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm, 23 January 2014

Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Oxford, 376 pp., £30, July 2013, 978 0 19 965780 3
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... could sweeten their tea with sugar in preference to honey? How many hundreds of thousands more Africans would have had to be heaped onto the scales to weigh more heavily with Pitt than the death of a single European? How many lives of ordinary people would weigh more than the life ...

Its Rolling Furious Eyes

James Vincent: Automata, 22 February 2024

Miracles and Machines: A 16th-Century Automaton and Its Legend 
by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd.
Getty, 245 pp., £39.99, August 2023, 978 1 60606 839 7
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... but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the tantalising concept of ...

What ho, Giotto!

Julian Symons, 7 February 1991

Stanley Spencer 
by Kenneth Pople.
Collins, 576 pp., £25, January 1991, 0 00 215320 3
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... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...

Fame at last

Elaine Showalter, 7 November 1991

Anne Sexton: A Biography 
by Diane Wood Middlebrook.
Virago, 488 pp., £20, November 1991, 1 85381 406 7
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... kind of work to her. Kumin remembered how Sexton would ‘willingly push a poem through twenty or more drafts’. Beginning with simple couplets and quatrains, she rapidly moved through a series of experiments with poetic forms, including acrostics and villanelles. Never much of a student or serious reader, Sexton knew little ...

Quality Distinctions

Edmund Leach, 17 December 1981

The Architecture of Experience: A Discussion of the Role of Language and Literature in the Construction of the World 
by G.D. Martin.
Edinburgh, 201 pp., £12, February 1981, 0 333 23560 6
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... Journal of Aesthetics. Part of the theory is derived, unacknowledged, from Saussure, but with the more celebrated, if debatable parts of the Saussurean scheme, such as the arbitrary nature and binary structure of the Saussurean sign, left out. Martin borrows from the psychologist Ulric Neisser a use of the term ‘icon’ which is quite different from that ...

At the Nasher Sculpture Centre

Anne Wagner: Neanderthal Art, 5 April 2018

... the Austrian village of Willendorf. Tiny yet massive, the figure’s fullness seems sculptural more or less by definition; its display of observation and exaggeration is so expert that, seen in the flesh, it’s a shock to realise how comfortably the carved stone could fit in your hand. Yet its talismanic immediacy makes it seem the embodiment of the ...

Coup-Contrecoup

Rahmane Idrissa, 24 February 2022

... defendants, including Diendéré and Compaoré, were indicted in connection with the murder of Thomas Sankara, Compaoré’s predecessor, in 1987. That trial has been suspended until 1 March, but the prosecution is seeking a thirty-year sentence for Compaoré, accusing him of ‘harming state security’, ‘concealment of corpses’ and ‘complicity in ...

Northern Laughter

Karl Miller: Macrone on Scott, 10 October 2013

The Life of Sir Walter Scott 
by John Macrone, edited by Daniel Grader.
Edinburgh, 156 pp., £65, February 2013, 978 0 7486 6991 2
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... of this book, Daniel Grader, sees Macrone as hailing from Scotland, on the say-so of the poet Thomas Moore; others favour the Isle of Man. Hogg met him when he was working as a shopman in Mayfair, and was then published by Macrone when Macrone went into partnership with James Cochrane in Pall Mall. Hogg came to like the two men, together with Cochrane’s ...