In a Faraway Pond

David Runciman: The NGO, 29 November 2007

Non-Governmental Politics 
edited by Michel Feher.
Zone, 693 pp., £24.95, May 2007, 978 1 890951 74 0
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... On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2016, 5 January 2017

... the lion has a wooden leg (complete with ferrule) and in the background to the funeral of St Jerome there is an armadillo and in the stampeding monks a touch of Vorticism. Other visitors arrive, photographing the pictures almost before looking at them while I park myself on one of the benches, in Venice always happy to ...

‘I’m not signing’

Mike Jay: Franco Basaglia, 8 September 2016

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care 
by John Foot.
Verso, 404 pp., £20, August 2015, 978 1 78168 926 4
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... in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The Reality of Mental Illness (1986).* Roth and Kroll wrote about Basaglia in the present tense though he had died six years earlier, and took him to be both a Marxist and of the opinion that psychiatric ...

How bad can it be?

John Lanchester: Getting away with it, 29 July 2021

... before. In the third test against New Zealand in 2017, he was knocked out by a forearm smash from Jerome Kaino, but shook it off and was allowed to stay on the field – which should have been a huge scandal but was shrugged off as men-will-be-men, concussion be damned.The fact that rugby dislikes and avoids simulation ...

What the Badger Found

Michael Kulikowski: Moneybags, 2 February 2023

When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics 
by Frank L. Holt.
Oxford, 336 pp., £25.99, October 2021, 978 0 19 751765 9
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Coin Hoards and Hoarding in the Roman World 
edited by Jerome Mairat, Andrew Wilson and Chris Howgego.
Oxford, 368 pp., £90, May 2022, 978 0 19 886638 1
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... Hoard, found in Wiltshire in 1978, probably the most famous Romano-British find, weighed 180 kg and contained more than fifty thousand low-value coins from the third century. The 1918 Komin hoard, found near the mouth of the Neretva river in Croatia, contained around three hundred thousand coins from the same era. Right now, half a million Roman coins ...

Some must get rich first

Colin Legum, 15 March 1984

The Heart of the Dragon 
by Alasdair Clayre.
Harvill, 281 pp., £12.95, January 1984, 0 00 272115 5
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The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Vol. II: The Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 
by Roderick MacFarquhar.
Oxford, 470 pp., £22.50, June 1983, 0 19 214996 2
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Son of the Revolution 
by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro.
Chatto, 301 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 7011 2751 1
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Shenfan 
by William Hinton.
Secker, 789 pp., £15.95, November 1983, 0 436 19630 1
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The Messiah and the Mandarins 
by Dennis Bloodworth.
Weidenfeld, 331 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 297 78054 9
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The Cambridge History of China. Vol. XII: Republican China 1912-1949, Part I 
edited by John Fairbank.
Cambridge, 1002 pp., £50, October 1983, 0 521 23541 3
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The Middle Kingdom: Inside China Today 
by Erwin Wickert.
Harvill, 397 pp., £12.50, August 1983, 0 00 272113 9
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... the period from 1912 to 1949. The book has many distinguished contributors: among them, Professor Jerome Ch’en, writing on the Chinese Communist movement up to 1927; Professor C. Martin Wilbur, who describes the creation of the revolutionary movement and the drive to unify China in the five critical years between 1923 and ...

Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan: Valentine Cunningham, 19 September 2002

Reading after Theory 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Blackwell, 194 pp., £45, December 2001, 0 631 22167 0
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... the fact that the best work on bibliographical coding, on manuscript, print and mise-en-page (by Jerome McGann and others) has a theoretical cast. The deficiency is only too clear in his account of ‘This Living Hand’, a poem which is fully expressive only when read as a manuscript text. Many poems survive in ...

Ogres are cool

Colin Burrow: Grimm Tales, 20 March 2025

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography 
by Ann Schmiesing.
Yale, 336 pp., £25, January, 978 0 300 22175 6
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... The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... a Communist because I am a Jew’ was a sentence she heard ‘more than once’ in Frognal; when Jerome Robbins named names before the Committee in 1953, he claimed to have been attracted to Communism because ‘Fascism and anti-semitism were synonymous to me.’ It is not true that the overwhelming majority of American ...

Inhumane, Intolerant, Unclean

Ian Gilmour, 31 October 1996

A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths 
by Karen Armstrong.
HarperCollins, 474 pp., £20, July 1996, 0 00 255522 0
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Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years 
by Israel Shahak.
Pluto, 118 pp., £11.99, April 1994, 9780745308180
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City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present 
edited by Nitza Rosovsky.
Harvard, 562 pp., £25.50, April 1996, 0 674 13190 8
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Jerusalem in the 20th Century 
by Martin Gilbert.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 7011 3070 9
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Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict 
by Norman Finkelstein.
Verso, 230 pp., £39.95, December 1995, 1 85984 940 7
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To Rule Jerusalem 
by Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht.
Cambridge, 554 pp., £29.95, June 1996, 0 521 44046 7
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... by Constantine’s conversion, proceeded to ban Jews from Jerusalem; they were, claimed Jerome, ‘not worthy of compassion’. The Jews were too weak to repay in kind the uncompassionate conduct of the Christians. Yet, as Israel Shahak shows in his ruthlessly penetrating examination of Jewish religion and ...

Red makes wrong

Mark Ford: Harry Mathews, 20 March 2003

The Human Country: New and Collected Stories 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 186 pp., £10.99, October 2002, 1 56478 321 9
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The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 290 pp., £10.99, April 2003, 1 56478 288 3
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... of St Augustine’: the saint has just been informed by a miraculous voice of the death of St Jerome, to whom he was about to write a letter. To the left, bathed in celestial light, sits an alert and expectant Maltese dog, who seems to be asking of his astonished master: ‘What next?’ OuLiPian constraints, Mathews ...

Diary

Cynthia Lawford: On Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 21 September 2000

... to wreak her vengeance upon herself, to refuse to live.’ In The Poetics of Sensibility (1996), Jerome McGann remarked that, as a young single woman and professional writer, ‘Landon had to negotiate her way with great care and deliberation’ in London society. ‘The consequence is a (socially) self-conscious style of ...

Elegant Extracts

Leah Price: Anthologies, 3 February 2000

The Oxford Book of English Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 690 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 214182 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2974 pp., £22.50, December 1999, 0 393 97487 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2963 pp., £22.50, February 2000, 9780393974911
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2963 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01173 2
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2982 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01174 0
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Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature 
edited by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9153 4
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News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 189 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 571 20060 5
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Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Anvil, 157 pp., £7.95, November 1999, 0 85646 313 2
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Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Penguin, 640 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780140588996
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... Paulin’s Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990), with its graffiti and cross-stitch mottoes, or Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998). The chapter on ‘The Romantics and Their Contemporaries’ includes a custard advertiser among the latter, opens the Blake headnote with an ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... rates. He replaced Janet Yellen, a high-profile Obama appointee, with a mainstream figure, Jerome Powell, who has continued the policies of ‘normalisation’ Yellen began: ending quantitative easing and gradually raising interest rates. These moves are counter to hopes of breakneck economic growth, and should there ...

Daisy Chains

Emma Hogan: Sappho 1900, 20 May 2021

No Modernism without Lesbians 
by Diana Souhami.
Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4
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... window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William ...