Squeegee Abstracts

Malcolm Bull: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic, 10 August 2023

Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History 
by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
MIT, 661 pp., £40, September 2022, 978 0 262 54353 8
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... multimedia work provocative enough to entice the public back to contemporary art galleries they may have visited many times already.Richter somehow manages to do both. On the one hand, he uses an oversized squeegee to make huge colourful abstracts that can sell for £20 million each; on the other, he is the creator of austere constructions in ...

Salute!

Stephen Holmes: ‘Bomb Power’, 8 April 2010

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State 
by Garry Wills.
Penguin Press, 278 pp., $27.95, January 2010, 978 1 59420 240 7
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... great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Dick Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all constitutional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of ...

Religion is a sin

Galen Strawson: Immortality!, 2 June 2011

Saving God: Religion after Idolatry 
by Mark Johnston.
Princeton, 198 pp., £16.95, August 2009, 978 0 691 14394 1
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Surviving Death 
by Mark Johnston.
Princeton, 393 pp., £24.95, February 2010, 978 0 691 13012 5
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... not just in it?’ Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... liberation. While such a direct equation between literary hermeneutics and political repression may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the ...

Flower or Fungus?

Barbara Graziosi: Bacchylides, 31 July 2008

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition 
by David Fearn.
Oxford, 428 pp., £70, July 2007, 978 0 19 921550 8
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... discovery was made by natives, to which fact the unfortunately mutilated condition of the papyrus may be ascribed. Most of the fractures are recent.’ The Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge, writing in 1920, remembered that he bought the papyrus ‘at a preposterous price’ from an Egyptian dealer, who said it had been found in a ransacked tomb between the feet ...

Best Known for His Guzzleosity

Helen Hackett: Shakespeare’s Authors, 11 March 2010

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 367 pp., £20, April 2010, 978 0 571 23576 6
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... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...

Dropping In for a While

Thomas Jones: Maile Meloy, 2 December 2010

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It 
by Maile Meloy.
Canongate, 219 pp., £7.99, 9781847674166
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... dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 ...

What’s it for?

Martin Loughlin: The Privy Council, 22 October 2015

By Royal Appointment: Tales from the Privy Council – the Unknown Arm of Government 
by David Rogers.
Biteback, 344 pp., £25, July 2015, 978 1 84954 856 4
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... but this was a parliament in which council members played leading roles. The king in council may not have been able to enact legislation but he could certainly make ordinances in areas of government such as foreign relations and control of the military, trade, printing, coinage and aliens. Over the following centuries, the council became a central part ...

North Korea’s Bomb

Norman Dombey, 2 February 2017

... disable Iran’s nuclear programme.But there were other voices. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, a former head of policy planning at the US State Department, outlined a compromise that would limit but not end Iran’s ability to enrich uranium: it would be allowed to continue enriching uranium for use in civil nuclear reactors to produce ...

Conversations with Myself

Michael Wood: Fernando Pessoa, 19 July 2018

The Book of Disquiet 
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Serpent’s Tail, 413 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78125 864 4
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... said this in an anonymous article; and we note that whatever the names, and whatever ‘outside’ may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who was ‘acutely aware of how the author got in the way of the writing’. Fernando ...

Pens and Heads

Maggie Kilgour: The Young Milton, 21 October 2021

Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton 
by Nicholas McDowell.
Princeton, 494 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 15469 5
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... allows us a glimpse of what he read and when. It’s clear he read a great deal and some of it may now seem esoteric – Socrates Scholasticus’s Historia Ecclesiastica, for instance – but there is little that is unusual for the time. Nor is there anything that suggests an early radicalism. The histories he read between 1639 and 1643 must have informed ...

The Marxist and the Messiah

Terry Eagleton: Snapshots of Benjamin, 9 September 2021

The Benjamin Files 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 262 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 1 78478 398 3
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... G.E. Moore, drily reported that the Tractatus was ‘a work of genius, but be that as it may’ met the requirements for a PhD. The rest of Wittgenstein’s work was published after his death, and a lot of it abandons academic decorum for aphorisms, snatches of dialogue, cryptic musings, teasing questions and homely images. Benjamin, too, is a master ...

Mischief Wrought

Stephen Sedley: The Compensation Culture Myth, 4 March 2021

Fake Law: The Truth about Justice in an Age of Lies 
by the Secret Barrister.
Picador, 400 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 5290 0994 1
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... helmets, and on and on), the dismissive spelling ‘elf n safety’ used by journalists such as Richard Littlejohn to suggest that it’s an infantilising regime run by ignorant jobsworths obscures the fact that since 1975 there has been a reduction of four-fifths in workplace deaths and of well over two-thirds in reported workplace injuries. As SB ...

Extravagance

Ross McKibbin, 2 February 1989

The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924-1936 
by Peter Clarke.
Oxford, 348 pp., £29.50, November 1988, 0 19 828304 0
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... Clarke argues (I am sure correctly) that between its response to We can conquer unemployment and Richard Hopkins’s evidence to the Macmillan Committee the Treasury shifted the ground of its opposition to state-financed capital works from an economic-ideological one to a ‘practical’ one. He seems to suggest (though I ...

A Life of Henry Reed

Jon Stallworthy, 12 September 1991

... legitimate children fathered an illegitimate son who died during the Second World War. In this, he may have been following ancestral precedent: family legend had it that the Reeds were descended from the bastard son of an 18th or 19th-century Earl of Dudley. Henry senior’s other enthusiasms included reading, but the literary abilities of his son Henry ...