I haven’t been I

Colm Tóibín: The Real Fernando Pessoa, 12 August 2021

Pessoa: An Experimental Life 
by Richard Zenith.
Allen Lane, 1088 pp., £40, July, 978 0 241 53413 7
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... all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.The great thing is that the narrator goes on and on, sometimes in ...

‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... the Act of Union, ‘from which … the united fortunes of Great Britain flow on to their unknown destiny’. Japan is ‘the meeting of the waters’ of East and West and multicultural England is described by Jusserand as the ‘meeting of the waters’, Norman, Saxon and Dane coming together so that ‘England is now “merrie England”, bursting ...

The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

... sense of my own identity as a person free to roam the city, in narrative negotiation, because my unknown friend elects to sit, to define his place. To witness and wait. I am comforted by his persistence, staying resolutely in his slump while hospitals and churches fall. But I am also aware, of course, that he’s one of the damaged of the city. He is not ...

Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
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... by prices in a free market they would be groping in the dark, and stumbling towards miseries unknown since the middle ages. Some socialists might relish the prospect, persuading themselves that wealth corrupts and poverty breeds virtue; but if they meant what they said about constructing a ‘rational economic system’ they would have to swallow their ...

Theirs and No One Else’s

Nicholas Spice: Conductors’ Music, 16 March 2023

Tár 
directed by Todd Field.
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Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary 
by Chris Walton.
Rochester, 306 pp., £26.99, February 2021, 978 1 64825 012 5
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In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor 
by Alice Farnham.
Faber, 298 pp., £16.99, January 2023, 978 0 571 37050 4
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... young love, but the single-minded purpose of the film is to show her as a woman who, for reasons unknown, is pathologically incapable of human empathy, and the cohabitation within the same fictive space of Mahler’s intensely expressive music and the portrayal of a disordered mind ensures the inevitable elision of the one with the other.Tár rations its ...

Old Literature and its Enemies

Claude Rawson, 25 April 1991

The Death of Literature 
by Alvin Kernan.
Yale, 230 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 300 04783 5
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Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7156 2337 0
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Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man 
by David Lehman.
Poseidon, 318 pp., $21.95, February 1991, 0 671 68239 3
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... and I have heard Derrida described as a vedette américaine. Paul de Man seems to be largely unknown in French intellectual life. For all his knowingness to the effect that the real world is a bigger place than the academy and one to whose pressures the academy, including the literary sub-cultures, are subject, Kernan is imprisoned in the eerily ...

From the Other Side

David Drew, 1 August 1985

... whose opening words characteristically, and with cogent symbolism, were taken from the then unknown or forgotten Benjamin. The result of this seven-year process was a book entitled, prophetically, Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Its publication in Tübingen in 1949 profoundly influenced the development of New Music for the next two decades, and marked the ...
... adherents of Verkhovensky’s quintet, but he has many other instruments in the town, sometimes unknown to themselves – for example, the provincial governor’s wife, Yulia Mikhailovna, who has become so enamoured of the new ideas she imbibes from him that she has virtually converted her salon into a revolutionary cell, arousing jealousy in the other ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... the younger Empson’s notes on Ludovici, but the main point is that the family is an arrangement unknown to the Wurroos, who therefore aren’t Oedipal, and need a civilisation that can be established without the creative energies born of sexual repression. George Bickersteth, Empson’s colonial administrator, is an intelligent human and sexually quite ...

How confident should she be?

Richard Lloyd Parry: Aung San Suu Kyi, 26 April 2012

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi 
by Peter Popham.
Rider, 446 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 1 84604 248 5
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... Pasternak Slater remembers her as ‘serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all determination and an unknown void to cross’. She moved to New York, began another degree, abandoned it, then got a job in an unglamorous corner of UN headquarters thanks to another well-placed friend of the family, the secretary-general U Thant. (‘You not only have the courage of ...

Lost in the Void

Jonathan Littell: In Ciudad Juárez, 7 June 2012

... follow-up, no investigative report, no arrest, no trial, not even a rudimentary explanation of why unknown persons saw fit to immerse José Gallegos’s head in acid. In subsequent issues of PM, his photo will be replaced by photos of other corpses. ‘What drives people crazy,’ Roberto Alvarez Gutiérez, a municipal police officer, explains, ‘is that ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... with his own lifetime. Here it was language rather than prejudice that isolated his work, unknown to the non-Arabophone world till its translation into French many years later. A reclusive semi-Belgian, a dead Sicilian, an obscure Egyptian. That was about where the historical novel lay, a few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash, for some 30 years ...

How can it work?

David Runciman: American Democracy, 21 March 2013

... Second, this is not an answer to climate change. Not only are the long-term ecological effects unknown, but fracking will do nothing to alter the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. What it does allow is time for more technocratic tinkering, and the possibility of further government investment in sustainable alternatives, though without a national ...

How can we live with it?

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change, 23 May 2013

The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix It 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 273 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 300 18659 8
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Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering 
by Clive Hamilton.
Yale, 247 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 300 18667 3
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The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live 
by Brian Stone.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £19.99, July 2012, 978 1 107 60258 8
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... a phytoplankton bloom over 4000 square miles of ocean. Beyond that, the effects are as yet unknown. Another possibility, instead of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, is to turn down the heat, using what’s known as ‘solar radiation management’. The term was coined by Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institute, who ...

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

... Ford, answering all questions, readily admits what she cannot remember. One previously unknown bit of information that Ford reveals is that she first contacted her congresswoman with her story when she saw Kavanaugh’s name on the shortlist of potential nominees. She felt it was her ‘civic duty’ to alert the authorities that there were serious ...