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Diary

Hugh Pennington: Smallpox Scares, 5 September 2002

... from their use are far more common and more serious than from any other vaccine. Their origins are unknown: genetic fingerprinting has shown that they did not come from Jenner’s cowpox vaccine and records of their lineage fade into complete obscurity in the 19th century. There is a story that one strain came from a soldier during the Franco-Prussian ...

In Bloody Orkney

Robert Crawford: George Mackay Brown, 22 February 2007

George Mackay Brown: The Life 
by Maggie Fergusson.
Murray, 363 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 7195 5659 7
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The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown 
edited by Brian Murray.
Murray, 547 pp., £18.99, October 2006, 0 7195 6884 6
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... This linguistic digging in can be quickened by listening to other tongues, yet it is almost unknown for a poet to settle in a language – as distinct from an accent – learned after childhood. Only a few remarkable people have written with distinction in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost ...

Otherwise Dealt With

Chalmers Johnson: ‘extraordinary rendition’, 8 February 2007

Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme 
by Stephen Grey.
Hurst, 306 pp., £16.95, November 2006, 1 85065 850 1
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... jet with the registration number N379P painted on its tail. It took off at 2.40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19.54 on 26 October, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com website. A few minutes later a blogger reported the aircraft’s registered owner: Premier Executive Transport Services of ...

Diary

Yonatan Mendel: At the Herzliya Conference, 22 February 2007

... their hands at a discussion that is discussion-free? On the eve of a war with Iran, a war with unknown consequences, Israelis refuse even to consider an option that does not involve violence. A country that has lived by the sword refuses to question it, even when its own future is at risk. I think of the frog and scorpion story. I do not know who the frog ...

Feuds Corner

Thomas Jones: Ismail Kadare, 6 September 2007

Chronicle in Stone 
by Ismail Kadare, translated by Arshi Pipa.
Canongate, 301 pp., £7.99, May 2007, 978 1 84195 908 5
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Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami and Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Canongate, 226 pp., £7.99, August 2007, 978 1 84195 978 8
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The Successor 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Canongate, 207 pp., £6.99, January 2007, 978 1 84195 887 3
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The File on H 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Vintage, 169 pp., £7.99, August 2006, 0 09 949719 0
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... in the event of the writer’s natural or “accidental” death, to declare that a previously unknown portion of his work would be published quickly. The revelation of … the unpublished works would make it much harder for the Communist propaganda machine to bend Kadare’s work and posthumous image to its own ends.’ The action of the novella, which is ...

Walking through Walls

Graham Robb: The world’s first anti-hero rogue cop, 18 March 2004

Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime 
AK Press, 370 pp., £14, July 2003, 1 902593 71 5Show More
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... did a criminal whom he examined leave his office without confessing his crime or giving some clue, unknown to himself, by which to convict him.’ It was Commissioner Henry who gave Vidocq his big break by arranging his ‘escape’ from La Force prison and employing him as a thief-catcher and informer. The perspicacious Henry, known to friend and foe alike as ...

Tiny Little Lars

Joanna Kavenna: Von Trier’s Provocations, 15 April 2004

Trier on von Trier 
edited by Stig Björkman, translated by Neil Smith.
Faber, 288 pp., £16.99, February 2004, 0 571 20707 3
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Dogville 
directed by Lars von Trier.
May 2003
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... in her alabaster hands and expensive clothes. She is on the run from mobsters, for reasons unknown, in fear for her life. Dogville is structured in chapters, like Breaking the Waves, but also has a narrator (John Hurt) who supplies a mocking commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul ...

Go away and learn

J.L. Nelson: Charlemagne’s Superstate, 15 April 2004

Charlemagne 
by Matthias Becher, translated by David Bachrach.
Yale, 170 pp., £16.95, September 2003, 0 300 09796 4
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... into war (they were co-heirs). Charlemagne’s sister-in-law fled with her sons (‘for reasons unknown’, Einhard wrote) to Italy and the protection of the Lombard king. They were pursued by Charlemagne, and the nephews were captured and never heard of again. The conquest of the Lombard kingdom can perhaps be seen as a by-product of all this. On the ...

A Turk, a Turk, a Turk

Christopher Tayler: Orhan Pamuk, 5 August 2004

Snow 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 436 pp., £12.99, May 2004, 0 571 22065 7
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... Y.K. Karaosmanoglu’): ‘To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery . . . what else is this but the birth of a great passion?’ Pamuk’s next two novels, The Black Book and The New Life, are more strenuously avant-garde; they also won him enormous fame in Turkey, where The New ...

Diary

Graham Robb: The Tour de France, 19 August 2004

... Just before the Tour began, the British rider David Millar – very popular in France, almost unknown in Britain – confessed to taking EPO. He has now been stripped of his world time-trial title. This is the first time since 1978 that no British rider has taken part in the Tour. Suspicions about Armstrong are being fuelled by a book which appeared in ...

Such Matters as the Soul

Dmitri Levitin: ‘The Invention of Science’, 22 September 2016

The Invention of Science: a New History of the Scientific Revolution 
by David Wootton.
Penguin, 784 pp., £12.99, September 2016, 978 0 14 104083 7
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... of thinkers, based around Miletus in Ionia, asked questions about the world in a way that was unknown to, and directly critical of, their predecessors. They were interested in questions about the world’s shape and composition, in particular whether it was made up of one substance or many. Most important, the answers they came up with, though to the ...

Didn’t we agree to share?

Sheila Heti: ‘The First Wife’, 13 July 2017

The First Wife 
by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw.
Archipelago, 250 pp., £14.99, August 2016, 978 0 914671 48 0
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... to his freedom to visit whichever he desires that night, and for his movements to remain virtually unknown to the rest. But in the system of polygamy, when a husband moves from one house to the next, the wives must gather to hear a report: of how and what he has eaten, how he has slept. His independence vanishes when his girlfriends become wives: they ...

Howitzers on the Hill

Neal Ascherson: ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’, 8 March 2018

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh 
by Franz Werfel, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop, revised by James Reidel.
Penguin, 912 pp., £10.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 33286 3
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... and a poor command of the language, but has returned to his native village at the moment when, unknown to him, the great deportations are being planned in Istanbul. With Gabriel come his sophisticated French wife, Juliette, and their young son, Stephan. At first, Juliette is charmed by the place but soon, as Gabriel mingles with the villagers, riddles of ...

Diary

Richard Lloyd Parry: In Pyongyang, 24 January 2019

... not only were all of its citizens unimprovably provided for, even personal anguish was unknown. I have no doubt that, in reality, my young guide was fully acquainted with despair, and may well have known people who had been driven to kill themselves: just a few years before, in the late 1990s, the country had been struck by a famine so dreadful ...

Can we eat them?

Rivka Galchen: Knausgaard’s Escape, 24 January 2019

Autumn 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 240 pp., £16.99, August 2017, 978 1 910701 63 8
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Winter 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 272 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 1 910701 65 2
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Spring 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 192 pp., £16.99, February 2018, 978 1 910701 67 6
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Summer 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Ingvild Burkey.
Harvill Secker, 416 pp., £16.99, June 2018, 978 1 910701 69 0
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... an adult? He writes in the paragraph that follows that the figure signified ‘the shadow of the unknown’ or ‘the darkness within the light’, but this feels like just one notecard in a deck of possibilities. Although there are many interesting moments in Spring, the reader basically wants out, as the characters do. A bit after the middle of the ...

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