On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
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A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
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... Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy ...

Shoe-Contemplative

David Bromwich: Hazlitt, 18 June 1998

The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 382 pp., £22.50, June 1998, 0 571 17421 3
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... wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working from a subtext of his own: Hazlitt’s crimes against ...

Jolly Jack and the Preacher

Patrick Parrinder, 20 April 1989

A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars 
by D.L. LeMahieu.
Oxford, 396 pp., £35, June 1988, 0 19 820137 0
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... for public attention, rather than acting as the spokesmen for inherently incompatible values. William Wordsworth, whose essays and prefaces originated much of the rhetoric of high-cultural debate, distinguishes between a taste for poetry – which involves active mental participation by the reader – and one for ‘rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or ...

Why weren’t they grateful?

Pankaj Mishra: Mossadegh, 21 June 2012

Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Bodley Head, 310 pp., £20, February 2012, 978 1 84792 108 6
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... sovereignty and national dignity – why did they continue to ignore Iran? He was supported by a broad coalition of new Asian countries. Even the delegate from Taiwan, which had been given its seat in the UN at the expense of Mao’s People’s Republic of China, reminded the British that ‘the day has passed when the control of the Iranian oil industry can ...

Clashes and Collaborations

Linda Colley, 18 July 1996

Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present 
by Denis Judd.
HarperCollins, 517 pp., £25, March 1996, 9780002552370
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Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Cambridge, 400 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 0 521 43211 1
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Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 
by Anthony Pagden.
Yale, 244 pp., £19.95, August 1995, 0 300 06415 2
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... from European history conventionally understood. Instead, imperial history should be massively broad and always eclectic. It should involve national, European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course ...

Diary

Richard Wollheim: On A.J. Ayer, 27 July 1989

... In the Thirties many of the abler philosophers of the previous generation, such as H.H. Price or William Kneale, in no way iconoclasts, felt grateful to Freddie. No one who has responded to the cadence of Freddie’s prose could doubt the expressiveness of his philosophy, or the vision of the world out of which he wrote. It was a world in which all ...

Diary

Matt Frei: In Albania, 14 May 1992

... hap hazardly, often without any discernible strategic purpose. Cabbage fields in the middle of broad valleys are surrounded by bunkers. Tiny hamlets on deserted mountainsides are defended by scores of solid concrete bunkers, while the people, unable to find cement and bricks, are trying to build shacks with quarry stones and mud. In Petrash, the villagers ...

Sans Sunflowers

David Solkin, 7 July 1994

Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History 
by Stephen Eisenman, Thomas Crow, Brian Lukacher, Linda Nochlin and Frances Pohl.
Thames and Hudson, 376 pp., £35, March 1994, 0 500 23675 5
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... But equally suspect in the eyes of the new ‘critical’ regime, if not more so indeed, were broad surveys like the Pelican History of Art, those grand empiricist narratives dedicated to preserving the authority of the canon, and to parading a spectacular array of great masters and great masterpieces in a ‘pure’ space, cocooned from the ...

Imps and Ogres

Marina Warner, 6 June 2019

Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies 
by Lynne Vallone.
Yale, 339 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 300 22886 1
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... hands and delicate features; Paolozzi is a little older, squat and square, with a pug nose, full broad mouth and strong pudgy hands. Together – the film’s title – they make a droll Beckettian pair (Waiting for Godot was in 1956 on everyone’s mind), but Mazzetti adds a twist: her heroes are deaf-mutes. We watch them communicating by signing and facial ...

Cause and Effect

A.J. Ayer, 15 October 1981

Hume and the Problem of Causation 
by Tom Beauchamp and Alexander Rosenberg.
Oxford, 327 pp., £15, August 1981, 0 19 520236 8
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The Science of Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith 
by Knud Haakonssen.
Cambridge, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1981, 0 521 23891 9
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... for Hume both as a philosopher and as a man. The obituary notice, in the form of a letter to William Strahan, which Smith allowed to be published, along with Hume’s few pages of autobiography ‘My Own Life’, in 1777, concluded with the words: ‘Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching ...

I like you

Hermione Lee: Boston Marriage, 24 May 2007

Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England 
by Sharon Marcus.
Princeton, 356 pp., £12.95, March 2007, 978 0 691 12835 1
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... for George Sand and her close friendship with the outspoken Anna Jameson, was an exceptionally broad-minded observer. In her eagerness to show the respectability of female marriages, Marcus perhaps doesn’t make enough of the tone of that liberal milieu, in which the unshockable ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’ would have been the norm. Henry ...

Impervious to Draughts

Rosemary Hill: Das englische Haus, 22 May 2008

The English House 
by Hermann Muthesius, edited by Dennis Sharp, translated by Janet Seligman and Stewart Spencer.
Frances Lincoln, 699 pp., £125, June 2007, 978 0 7112 2688 3
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... of her own about interior decoration and dress reform. With her dark hair piled up under a broad-brimmed hat, high-waisted silk dress and velvet cloak, she looks in a photograph as if she is sitting for Klimt. The couple came to England in 1896, when Muthesius was given a post as technical attaché to the German Embassy with a brief to report back to ...

Added Fashion Value

David A. Bell: Capitalism’s Rosy Dawn, 7 October 2021

Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in 18th-Century France 
by William H. Sewell Jr.
Chicago, 412 pp., £28, April, 978 0 226 77046 8
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... political life. Is there a connection with the French Revolution?In responding to this question, William Sewell is attempting something quite different from a replay of past disputes. Although old enough to have participated in those disputes, he largely sidestepped them at the time. He made his reputation in 1980 with a brilliantly inventive book called ...

Theory with a Wife

Michael Wood, 3 October 1985

Mr Palomar 
by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver.
Secker, 118 pp., £8.50, September 1985, 0 436 08275 6
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Parrot’s Perch 
by Michel Rio, translated by Leigh Hafrey.
Dent, 88 pp., £7.95, September 1985, 0 460 04669 1
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Light Years 
by Maggie Gee.
Faber, 350 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 571 13604 4
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... of ‘three kinds of experience and inquiry’: visual, anthropological ‘or cultural in the broad sense’, and speculative. He is quite serious and also mildly mocking. These experiences matter, and mingle interestingly in the text. Calvino, one of the most inventive and thoughtful of writers, has been working (and playing) for years with the uses we ...
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 
edited by T.F. Hoad.
Oxford, 552 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 9780198611820
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Dictionary of Changes in Meaning 
by Adrian Room.
Routledge, 292 pp., £14.95, May 1986, 0 7102 0341 1
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The Story of English 
by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert McNeil.
Faber/BBC, 384 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 563 20247 5
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Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. I: Introduction and A-C 
edited by Frederic Cassidy.
Harvard, 903 pp., $60, July 1985, 0 674 20511 1
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... consideration of relationships between speech-community and society. Consequently the book has two broad lessons to teach. It will tell native Britons that their ancestral claims to the English tongue are of no greater moment than the settlers’ rights of Americans, Australians, Indians, Africans, or indeed any of the speakers of the ‘new Englishes’ which ...