... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1
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Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics 
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January 2023, 978 1 80085 462 8
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Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century 
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June 2023, 978 1 009 36623 6
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... When, at the beginning of the canto, ‘self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,’ the young hero finds himself, not coincidentally, ‘upon this place of skulls,/The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo’. Why not glimpse personal calamity in a generation’s burial place? (‘He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward ...

Llamas, Pizzas, Mandolins

Paul Taylor: AI Doomerism, 21 March 2024

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma 
by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar.
Bodley Head, 332 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 84792 948 8
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The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI 
by Fei-Fei Li.
Flatiron, 322 pp., £25.99, December 2023, 978 1 250 89793 0
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... in AI is rather wonderful. I only wish I had a clearer idea about how we should be educating the young people who come to us, now that so many of the skills we teach are susceptible to ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more ...

My Hands in My Face

Tom Crewe: Ocean Vuong’s Failure, 26 June 2025

The Emperor of Gladness 
by Ocean Vuong.
Cape, 397 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78733 540 0
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... forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... father has left the room – being there was only ever a prelude to leaving – and I sit alone, a young girl, listening with mounting anxiety to the sound of a Romanian pan flute. This is the music of restless souls – urgent, melancholic skids in a minor key, an unending complaint so depressing at times that one of its greatest exponents, Rezső ...

Stalker & Co

Damian Grant, 20 November 1986

... be felt, five of the six men who were ambushed and shot were unarmed at the time; and a sixth – Michael Tighe, shot dead in the barn – had no paramilitary connections. John Stalker’s special brief was to determine the involvement of the RUC in these events. One of the most disquieting revelations made in the press has been the degree to which the ...

Georgian eyes are smiling

Frank Kermode, 15 September 1988

Bernard Shaw. Vol. I: The Search for Love, 1856-1898 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 486 pp., £16, September 1988, 0 7011 3332 5
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Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters. Vol. IV 
edited by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 946 pp., £30, June 1988, 0 370 31130 2
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Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies. Vol. VIII 
edited by Stanley Weintraub.
Pennsylvania State, 175 pp., $25, April 1988, 0 271 00613 7
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Shaw’s Sense of History 
by J.L. Wisenthal.
Oxford, 186 pp., £22.50, April 1988, 0 19 812892 4
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Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. III: 1903-1907 
edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies.
Cambridge, 532 pp., £35, April 1988, 0 521 32387 8
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Joseph Conrad: ‘Nostromo’ 
by Ian Watt.
Cambridge, 98 pp., £12.50, April 1988, 0 521 32821 7
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... sort, he soaked himself in opera, and grew confident, though possibly no more than many other young men, of some sort of future greatness. At 20, having moved with the family to London, he was ghosting music criticism for Lee and writing stories, book reviews and part of a play about Jesus. The ‘pale, private Shaw’ he then was decided to be a ...

Hand and Foot

John Kerrigan: Seamus Heaney, 27 May 1999

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 478 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 571 19492 3
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The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study 
by Neil Corcoran.
Faber, 276 pp., £9.99, September 1998, 0 571 17747 6
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Seamus Heaney 
by Helen Vendler.
HarperCollins, 188 pp., £15.99, November 1998, 0 00 255856 4
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... in Time of Civil War’ for jolting us with images of violence (‘That dead young soldier in his blood’) even as it notices the sociable honey-bees building in the masonry of Thoor Ballylee. Yeats’s wide-angled truthfulness to the realities and potentialities of life is secured, for Heaney, by the buoyant in-placeness of a style ...

House-Cleaning

David Bromwich: I met a Republican, 7 March 2019

... by the FBI, it deepened the impression of an espionage implosion in the vicinity of Trump. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. His sentence was postponed by a DC district court in December (with a strong indication that ...

Reach-Me-Down Romantic

Terry Eagleton: For and Against Orwell, 19 June 2003

George Orwell 
by Gordon Bowker.
Little, Brown, 495 pp., £20, May 2003, 0 316 86115 4
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Orwell: The Life 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 448 pp., £20, June 2003, 0 7011 6919 2
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Orwell: Life and Times 
by Scott Lucas.
Haus, 180 pp., £8.99, April 2003, 1 904341 33 0
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... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...

Diary

Tabitha Lasley: At Cammell Laird, 20 June 2024

... The older workers wanted to take redundancy. The stagers didn’t. As Albertina says, they were a young department. They didn’t want to spend the next thirty years on the dole. Management claimed they were pitching for new business, but many suspected the yard was earmarked for closure.A strike was called on 28 June. When management threatened to tug the ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Tory journalists who campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement, including his cabinet colleague Michael Gove.Northern Irish politics are more turbulent than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party came close to an agreement for the restoration of power-sharing at the start of 2018, but the DUP ...