Marching Orders

Ronan Bennett: The new future of Northern Ireland, 30 July 1998

... on national assistance.’ Among those Protestants to whom O’Neill failed to get through was the young Ian Paisley, then making a name for himself as an anti-Catholic rabble-rouser. Paisley, a personal friend of District Inspector Nixon, began by denouncing O’Neill as a sell-out and a Lundy. To many, Paisley was a figure of ridicule, but as the political ...

Belonging

John Kerrigan, 18 July 1996

The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird 
by Justin Quinn.
Carcanet, 69 pp., £7.95, March 1995, 1 85754 125 1
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Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time 
by Eavan Boland.
Carcanet, 254 pp., £18.95, April 1995, 1 85754 074 3
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Collected Poems 
by Eavan Boland.
Carcanet, 217 pp., £9.95, November 1995, 1 85754 220 7
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Captain Lavender 
by Medbh McGuckian.
Gallery Press, 83 pp., £11.95, November 1994, 9781852351427
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... and ‘the’, rises to cosmic grandeur. This move towards involving the planets in the young Boland’s encounter with the old woman is nicely ironised by the way in which the poet’s belated rejection of harmonious servitude to English court culture is written in lines which themselves strike an elegantly Elizabethan note: but nothing now can ...

Among the Flutterers

Colm Tóibín: The Pope Wears Prada, 19 August 2010

The Pope Is Not Gay 
by Angelo Quattrocchi, translated by Romy Clark Giuliani.
Verso, 181 pp., £8.90, June 2010, 978 1 84467 474 9
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... the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg. In his book Goodbye! Good Men, author Michael Rose writes that the liberalised rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy. That vow was put in place originally because the Church did not want heirs making claims on ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... out together, producing the webzine Spiked, setting up media training for teens (Debating Matters, Young Journalists’ Academy, a ‘programme for London state-school pupils who have the passion and the guts, but not “the right contacts”’) and a confusing cloud of other organisations: the Manifesto Club, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern ...

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941

Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026

... and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a ...

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

... had to check,’ she said. Listening to her talk of her fears about Iraq and compare the loss of young men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description ‘theatre conferences’ makes these public discussions sound starchier than they were. I was happy to do my bit chairing events in exchange for the train fare and somewhere to sleep ...

Trained to silence

John Mepham, 20 November 1980

The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935 
edited by Nigel Nicolson.
Hogarth, 476 pp., £12.50, September 1979, 0 7012 0469 9
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Leave the Letters till we’re dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-41 
edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman.
Hogarth, 556 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 7012 0470 2
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The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III: 1925-1930 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell.
Hogarth, 384 pp., £10.50, March 1980, 0 7012 0466 4
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Virginia Woolf 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Routledge, 270 pp., £7.95, September 1979, 0 7100 0189 4
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Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon 
by Maria DiBattista.
Yale, 252 pp., £11, April 1980, 0 300 02402 9
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... have really attempted to throw light on them by relating them to the question of why she wrote. Michael Rosenthal’s book makes a very inadequate attempt to examine these issues. He has a thesis, though it is not entirely clear just what it is. In one version of it he states that ‘as an artist Woolf was obsessed with what we can call formal rather than ...

A Whale of a Time

Colm Tóibín, 2 October 1997

Roger Casement’s Diaries. 1910: The Black and the White 
edited by Roger Sawyer.
Pimlico, 288 pp., £10, October 1997, 9780712673754
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The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement 
edited by Angus Mitchell.
Anaconda, 534 pp., £40, October 1997, 9781901990010
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... National Museum and the Natural History Museum), his diaries remain in England. They were seen by Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the 1921 Treaty negotiations. In the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know ...

Smarter, Happier, More Productive

Jim Holt: ‘The Shallows’, 3 March 2011

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember 
by Nicholas Carr.
Atlantic, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2010, 978 1 84887 225 7
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... in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL ...

On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer 
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8
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... Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly abandoned it after the death of his father. He describes his youth as full of the usual ‘vanities’ – fashions, feasts, amorous dalliances. These, we are led to believe, took place before he ...

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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... about a Harvard student who pointed to a work by Frank Stella and asked his professor, her friend Michael Fried, ‘What’s so good about that?’ Fried replied that there are ‘days when Stella goes to the Metropolitan Museum. And he sits for hours looking at the Velázquezes, utterly knocked out by them … What he would like more than anything else is to ...

Bigness

Hal Foster: Rem Koolhaas, 29 November 2001

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 800 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6047 6
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Great Leap Forward 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 720 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6048 4
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... its exemplary form in a neglected episode. Long ago Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other young Europeans had adopted overlooked structures like American grain elevators as emblems of a functionalist Modernism to come. In Delirious New York Koolhaas claimed another sort of American primitive as a prototype for a renewed Modernism – the pragmatic ...

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7
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The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5
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The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6
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The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7
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... century as marking a gradual triumph over the inhumanity of slavery. John Newton was a dissolute young man who discovered a sense of discipline through the patient and strict management of slaves. He sailed from England to West Africa to the Caribbean with no apparent acknowledgment of the immorality of his actions. He didn’t talk about race, or national ...

A Positive Future

David Simpson: Ernst Cassirer, 26 March 2009

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture 
by Edward Skidelsky.
Princeton, 288 pp., £24.95, January 2009, 978 0 691 13134 4
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The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer 
edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash.
Chicago, 223 pp., £26.50, January 2009, 978 0 226 03686 1
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... explaining the construction of the world in his major work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Any young philosopher setting out to establish a career would be well advised to think twice before making a committed intellectual investment in the symbol. This is more obvious now than it would have been in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Cassirer was ...