At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Peter Doig, 6 March 2008

“... car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that ...”

At the Bodleian

Philip Knox: ‘Chaucer Here and Now’, 4 April 2024

“... the materials that do survive – in particular, the two copies of the Canterbury Tales produced by the same scribe in the early 15th century. We know the scribe was a prolific copyist of Middle English poetry, probably a man called Adam Pinkhurst, and it seems possible that he had some connection to Chaucer. The earlier of the two manuscripts, the so-called ...”

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
byDavid Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0Show More
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“... though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.Early in 1966, when I was 23 years old – married, with a baby, and a graduate student at ...”

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

“... Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt ...”

How Much Is Too Much?

Benjamin Kunkel: Marx’s Return, 3 February 2011

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism 
byDavid Harvey.
Profile, 296 pp., £14.99, April 2010, 978 1 84668 308 4Show More
A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ 
byDavid Harvey.
Verso, 368 pp., £10.99, March 2010, 978 1 84467 359 9Show More
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“... with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’ Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the general approach to Marx and Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the prophet of capitalism’s ever ‘more extensive and exhaustive crises’, and restated several basic articles of his thought: capitalism ...”

Old Literature and its Enemies

Claude Rawson, 25 April 1991

The Death of Literature 
byAlvin Kernan.
Yale, 230 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 300 04783 5Show More
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition 
byAlasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7156 2337 0Show More
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man 
byDavid Lehman.
Poseidon, 318 pp., $21.95, February 1991, 0 671 68239 3Show More
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“... to ‘define’ literature: it was the ‘theoretical naivety and innocence of system displayed by the literary establishment’ which made it ‘always vulnerable’ to the demolition which it suffered soon after at the hands of ‘structuralist and post-structuralist theorists’. The witnesses were not ‘defining literature’ but trying conscientiously ...”

Culture Wars

W.J.T. Mitchell, 23 April 1992

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world ...”

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
byAnshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7Show More
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“... of the journalist Anshel Pfeffer – looks increasingly like the embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an ...”

Malfunctioning Sex Robot

Patricia Lockwood: Updike Redux, 10 October 2019

Novels, 1959-65: ‘The Poorhouse Fair’; ‘Rabbit, Run’; ‘The Centaur’; ‘Of the Farm’ 
byJohn Updike.
Library of America, 850 pp., £36, November 2018, 978 1 59853 581 5Show More
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“... and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then ...”

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

“... who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent ...”

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

“... They were far from home and they were deeply patriotic. You could tell that they had been told by their selection committees, before embarking on the Atlantic crossing, that they should comport themselves as ambassadors and emissaries. But those local lawyers and Rotarians and Chambers of Commerce had not prepared them to hurry up, finish their studies and ...”

Wrong Again

Bruce Cumings: Korean War Games, 4 December 2003

“... the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible. The complacent US public seems unperturbed by Bush’s failure so far to find a single WMD in Iraq, even if the much more disputatious British public was immediately up in arms (so to speak) about the remarkable Intelligence failures that were used to justify the invasion. To grasp the full extent of this ...”

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
byDavid Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8Show More
Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
byBarbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5Show More
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“... photogenic and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... the old Soviet state, first the Baltic republics, then Ukraine and Central Asia. This was followed by the destruction of Yugoslavia. If Latvia and Slovenia, why not Scotland? After all, the SNP has (regrettably) decided to stay in Nato. It was intellectually exhilarating during two trips to Scotland this summer to witness and participate in the serious debates ...”

Cash Today

Andrew McGettigan: Who profits from student loans?, 5 March 2015

“... funding of undergraduate teaching in English universities and colleges, the move could be sold as consistent with fiscal austerity – it had the effect of reducing government spending. But the income of universities and colleges was spared the cuts made elsewhere because the gap was more than filled by higher ...”
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