Praeludium of a Grunt

Tom Crewe: Charles Lamb’s Lives, 19 October 2023

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb 
by Eric G. Wilson.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 300 23080 2
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... and that ‘the crazed parataxis still flashes the voltage of the street.’ We are told that Robert Southey’s ‘over-long nose’ gave his face a ‘workmanlike quality, and his work ethic is what he is largely remembered for’. And this, of a representation of melancholy: ‘He wears only linens over his loins. If they are soiled, we don’t ...

Stand-Off in Taiwan

Perry Anderson: Greens v. Blues in the South China Sea, 3 June 2004

... misfit with a grudge, melting into the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents – George Wallace or Robert Kennedy – like that. Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the immediate effect of the magical missile has ...

Scotch Urchins

Denton Fox, 22 May 1986

Alexander Montgomerie 
by R.D.S. Jack.
Scottish Academic Press, 140 pp., £4.50, June 1985, 0 7073 0367 2
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Letters of King James VI and I 
edited by G.P.V. Akrigg.
California, 546 pp., £32.75, November 1984, 0 520 04707 9
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The Concise Scots Dictionary 
by Mairi Robinson.
Aberdeen University Press, 819 pp., £17.50, August 1985, 0 08 028491 4
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... to be printed in Scotland into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that ...

Middle Positions

John Hedley Brooke, 21 July 1983

Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850-1875 
by Adrian Desmond.
Blond and Briggs, 287 pp., £15.95, October 1982, 0 85634 121 5
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Evolution without Evidence: Charles Darwin and ‘The Origin Species’ 
by Barry Gale.
Harvester, 238 pp., £18.95, January 1983, 0 7108 0442 3
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The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography 
by Janet Browne.
Yale, 273 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 300 02460 6
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The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinsm 
by Brain Leith.
Collins, 174 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 00 219548 8
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... fossil record, anxious as he had then been to dissociate himself from the Lamarckian atheism of Robert Grant. It is these twists and turns which make the intellectual history of Early Victorian science so captivating, and, when discussed in an essay of this quality, so rewarding. By emphasising the cultural context and cultural uses of different forms of ...

In the Box

Dale Peck, 6 February 1997

How Stella Got Her Groove Back 
by Terry McMillan.
Viking, 368 pp., £16, September 1996, 0 670 86990 2
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Push 
by Sapphire.
Secker, 142 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 436 20291 3
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The Autobiography of My Mother 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Vintage, 228 pp., £8.99, September 1996, 0 09 973841 4
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... for herself:I decide to sit out on my balcony and read a little of The Grace of Great Things by Robert Grudin which sounded good when I read the book jacket in the store but it turns out to be too academic and deep and not exactly beach reading so I put it down after a half hour and pick up Black Betty by Walter Mosley which I’ve been meaning to read ...

Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary

Mark Ford: Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary, 29 November 2007

... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
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Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
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Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
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... US government position’ was ‘We are in Berlin by right of conquest.’ As late as 1966, Robert McNamara briefed the president that one of the objectives of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally ...

Capture the Flag

Rory Scothorne: Labour in Scotland, 4 June 2026

A History of the Scottish Labour Party 
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 314 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 3995 4480 1
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... independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for Caithness. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was a member of the Scottish aristocracy who became famous in Argentina as ‘Don Roberto’ for his exploits as a cattle rancher, returning home to become the first president of the Scottish Labour Party and, later, the honorary ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... and nursery décor and its tendency to metonymise and otherwise play the figures of speech. Like Wallace Stevens, whom she much admired, she made jokes, and even more than in Stevens’s case, the jokes were sly, hardly perceptible, there for her own pleasure. Yet for all the ironies, visible and invisible, some of the poems even have a moral.She graduated ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... LSD to twenty inmates of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary nearly every day for 15 months. Robert Hyde at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital paid hundreds of students from Emerson, Harvard and MIT $15 each to drink a vial of liquid that might induce an ‘altered state’; in the aftermath, one of the subjects hanged herself in a clinic bathroom. As well ...

The Ugly Revolution

Michael Rogin: Martin Luther King Jr, 10 May 2001

I May Not Get there with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr 
by Michael Eric Dyson.
Free Press, 404 pp., £15.99, May 2000, 0 684 86776 1
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The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Vol. IV: Symbol of the Movement January 1957-December 1958 
edited by Clayborne Carson et al.
California, 637 pp., £31.50, May 2000, 0 520 22231 8
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... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...

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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... a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could ...

Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty, 25 July 1991

The Later Works 1925-1953. Vol. XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 
by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston.
Southern Illinois, 786 pp., $50, August 1990, 0 8093 1661 7
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Dewey 
by J.E. Tiles.
Routledge, 256 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 415 00908 1
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John Dewey and American Democracy 
by Robert Westbrook.
Cornell, 608 pp., $32.95, May 1991, 0 8014 2560 3
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Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford 
by Casey Blake.
North Carolina, 370 pp., $38.45, November 1990, 0 8078 1935 2
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... he turned from criticising capitalism to criticising the people who had rallied around Henry Wallace. Westbrook is made uncomfortable by this turn, but since I think that what has been called ‘the romance of American Communism’ was a disaster for the American Left, and that the Cold War was a good war, I am inclined to shrug off Westbrook’s claim ...