Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... garden in the shade. And while the old white rockers are well represented here (Bob Dylan 27, Neil Young 6, Bruce Springsteen 7), there is nothing from Rihanna, and only one line from Jay-Z (‘I’m not afraid of dying/I’m afraid of not trying’). Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin get one quotation each, which shows way too little R-E-S-P-E-C-T towards ...

In the Shallow End

Conor Gearty, 27 January 2022

... Robert​ Reed became president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 13 January 2020, succeeding Lady Hale. By the end of 2021, the Supreme Court had produced 111 judgments since his appointment, 53 in 2020 and 58 in 2021, with Lord Reed himself sitting in 56 of these cases. These decisions give us an opportunity to assess how his Supreme Court is performing in the current malign political atmosphere ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... Otis Ferguson, a reviewer who never puffed, thought Stewart in The Shop around the Corner ‘a young American with as broad and unaffected a base in a country’s experience as Huck Finn’. It has been the way of critics, and the habit on the whole of audiences, too, to take Stewart as something the native climate effortlessly produced. But Stewart for ...

His Bonnet Akimbo

Patrick Wright: Hamish Henderson, 3 November 2011

Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. I: The Making of the Poet (1919-53) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 416 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 1 84697 132 7
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Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. II: Poetry Becomes People (1954-2002) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 395 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 1 84697 063 4
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... friends, including the economist Piero Sraffa (who had known Henderson’s hero, Gramsci) and the young socialist historian E.P. Thompson, who shared his mistrust of the merely literary ‘culture boys’. He returned to Scotland, this time permanently, in the summer of 1946. Rebuffed by his father’s Glaswegian family, he embarked on a teacher training ...

Something for Theresa May to think about

John Barrell: The Bow Street Runners, 7 June 2012

The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012, 978 0 19 969516 4
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... Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the gallows’. These efforts did little, however, to appease his critics. One journalist thought that the six runners should attempt a form of ...

What’s not to like?

Stefan Collini: Ernest Gellner, 2 June 2011

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography 
by John Hall.
Verso, 400 pp., £29.99, July 2010, 978 1 84467 602 6
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... a stick. That photo also suggests, obscurely, a certain mismatch between the intense, challenging young man who confronts the camera with a stare falling somewhere between steely and sultry, and the professional role he was coming to occupy. For, to all intents and purposes, he was an orthodox product of Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ in its ...

His Generation

Keith Gessen: A Sad Old Literary Man, 19 June 2008

Alfred Kazin: A Biography 
by Richard Cook.
Yale, 452 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 300 11505 5
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... book and written almost entirely at this pitch of judgment. Even its composition was heroic: a young man from the poor Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn, just graduated from City College, teaching courses at night and reviewing books as they came along to help pay the bills, going to the enormous reading room, Room 315, at the Fifth Avenue flagship of ...

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems 
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5
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Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7
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... leisured classes, students, ex-students, dole bandits and freeloaders with the habit of literacy. Young lecturers, intense in leather jackets, peddled Raworth. ‘Read Raworth and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers ...

A Pox on the Poor

Steven Shapin: The First Vaccine, 4 February 2021

The Great Inoculator: The Untold Story of Daniel Sutton and His Medical Revolution 
by Gavin Weightman.
Yale, 216 pp., £16.99, August 2020, 978 0 300 24144 0
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... bourgeoisie, buying inoculation for their children and, if they hadn’t had the disease when young, for themselves. Inoculation came to seem safe enough, though there were notable and well-publicised accidents: the earl of Sunderland’s son died after being inoculated and so did a footman of the earl of Bathurst – ‘a strong, hail ...

Batter My Heart

Catherine Nicholson: Who was John Donne?, 19 January 2023

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne 
by Katherine Rundell.
Faber, 352 pp., £16.99, April 2022, 978 0 571 34591 5
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... 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a ...

Stay away from politics

William Davies: Why Weber?, 21 September 2023

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.
Harvard, 132 pp., £19.95, April 2023, 978 0 674 27938 4
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... academics aren’t sufficiently focused on preparing their students for the labour market and that young people are being duped into studying subjects that won’t deliver ‘good outcomes’ in the form of future earnings. Rishi Sunak’s recent pledge to ‘crack down on rip-off university courses’ (defined as those whose graduates haven’t entered a ...

Colette

Angela Carter, 2 October 1980

... a friend. There comes a time when a woman freely publicises her age so that people can say: ‘How young you look!’ It seems to have come later than most to Colette, but when it did, she gloried in it.In tandem with this characteristically, if rather Hollywood, Edwardian career, two writers are growing within her. One writes, in 1910, La Vagabonde, a novel ...

Hairy Teutons

Michael Ledger-Lomas: What William Morris Wanted, 8 May 2025

William Morris: Selected Writings 
edited by Ingrid Hanson.
Oxford, 632 pp., £110, July 2024, 978 0 19 289481 6
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... we might connect his prodigious if uneven writing with his dizzying array of concerns.Like many a young writer, Morris already had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson ...

If We Say Yes

Amia Srinivasan: Campus Speech, 23 May 2024

... even where it presumably hurts them to do so; both the Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George and Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact, spoke out against the suspension of Dean while objecting strongly to her views. But notably absent from the letter in support of Dean were the signatures of many prominent free-speech warriors, including ...

Thin Pink Glaze

Holly Case: Habsburg Legacies, 20 November 2025

Lost Fatherland: Europeans between Empire and Nation-States, 1867-1939 
by Iryna Vushko.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, April 2024, 978 0 300 26755 6
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... the empire. Until the war began, tolerance and compromise kept many of those visions on hold. In Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna just before the war and a monument to the Habsburg polity, Ulrich, the protagonist, has been ‘accustomed his whole life long to expect politics to bring about not what needed to happen, but rather ...