Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
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... doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for the ...

All the world’s a spy novel

Michael Wood: What Didn’t Happen, 30 July 2020

Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been 
by Christopher Prendergast.
Bloomsbury, 257 pp., £19.99, February 2019, 978 1 350 09009 5
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Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction 
by Catherine Gallagher.
Chicago, 359 pp., £26.50, January 2018, 978 0 226 51241 9
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... quotes Mill’s wonderful remark about the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’, and we may well think that they also serve who only sit and sleep. For both Prendergast and Catherine Gallagher, the counterfactual is not any old fantasy but an alarm call for those who have been sleeping too long or too comfortably. There are attractions and risks in ...

Christ in Purple Silk

Irina Dumitrescu: Medieval Selfhood, 2 March 2023

The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships 
by Barbara Newman.
Pennsylvania, 378 pp., £58, September 2021, 978 0 8122 5334 4
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... all around her, which turn out to be protective angels.As astonishing as Margery’s experiences may be to the modern reader, she was following a familiar script. She knew about the experiences of other mystics, including the celebrity saint Bridget of Sweden, and her divine visions echoed theirs. She may even have been ...

What happened to MacDiarmid

David Norbrook, 23 October 1986

Hugh MacDiarmid: The Man and his Work 
by Nancy Gish.
Macmillan, 235 pp., £25, June 1984, 0 333 29473 4
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Complete Poems 
by Hugh MacDiarmid.
Penguin, £8.95, February 1985, 0 14 007913 0
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... thistle. The poem’s starting-point is a critique of the cult of the ultimate Scots lyric poet, Robert Burns, who has become a justification in his native land for permanently excluding ideas, politics, and everything but sentiment and banal platitudes, from poetry. All his major poetry from A drunk man onward aims at an inclusiveness that resists ...

The Revolution is over

R.W. Johnson, 16 February 1989

The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy 1789-1989 
edited by Geoffrey Best.
Fontana, 241 pp., £4.95, November 1988, 0 00 686056 7
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... was never off the agenda. One can go further, however. Historical awareness of the Revolution may not run deep among the mass of Frenchmen, but it often does among the élite, for whom it constitutes an elaborate dramatic metaphor shadowing the practices and institutions of contemporary life. Thus at the height of the ...

Down with deflation!

Paul Seabright, 12 December 1996

... important aspects of economic policy, but also from the acceptance by the rest of us of what they may legitimately do in the exercise of this control. Until recently, our acceptance of the notion that central bankers should be committed to price stability has been entirely uncritical; and price stability (not low, but zero inflation) is what the European ...

An American Romance

Edward Mendelson, 18 February 1982

Old Glory: An American Voyage 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 527 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 9780002165211
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No particular place to go 
by Hugo Williams.
Cape, 200 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 224 01810 8
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... Millet, points to the kind of truth that the inexactitudes of myth can reveal: ‘One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving ...

The Road to Sligo

Tom Paulin, 17 May 1984

Poetry and Metamorphosis 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Cambridge, 97 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 521 24848 5
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Translations 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 120 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 19 211958 3
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Conversation with the Prince 
by Tadeusz Rozewicz, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Anvil, 206 pp., £4.95, March 1982, 0 85646 079 6
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Passions and Impressions 
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 396 pp., £16.50, October 1983, 0 571 12054 7
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An Empty Room 
by Leopold Staff, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £3.25, March 1983, 0 906427 52 5
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... work. In a long, dedicatory preface he states that his expressed confidence in his own translation may appear arrogant: ‘yet is intended for the honour of my country.’ He attacks the ‘affected purity’ of the French language and asserts that the self-conscious perfectionism of French writers has ‘unsinewed’ their heroic verse. Virgil identifies ...

Just How It was

Anne Hollander: The work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, 7 May 1998

Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson 
edited by E.H. Gombrich.
Thames and Hudson, 144 pp., £32, February 1998, 9780500542187
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Europeans 
edited by Jean Clair.
Thames and Hudson, 231 pp., £29.95, January 1998, 0 500 28052 5
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... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...

Who wouldn’t buy it?

Colin Burrow: Speculating about Shakespeare, 20 January 2005

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Cape, 430 pp., £20, October 2004, 9780224062763
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... have met a porcupine in a book and liked the word. Like Rowe, too, Greenblatt thinks Shakespeare may have stolen deer, but for him this was ‘a skilful assault upon property, a symbolic violation of the social order, a coded challenge to authority’, since Greenblatt likes appositional clauses as much as he likes to think that Will was a bit of a boy ...

Retripotent

Frank Kermode: B. S. Johnson, 5 August 2004

Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson 
by Jonathan Coe.
Picador, 486 pp., £20, June 2004, 9780330350488
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‘Trawl’, ‘Albert Angelo’ and ‘House Mother Normal’ 
by B.S. Johnson.
Picador, 472 pp., £14.99, June 2004, 0 330 35332 2
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... he thinks the child meant to call his enormous instructor a ‘fairy elephant’ ). It may be true that in the 1960s and early 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the best-known young novelists in Britain’, but his celebrity quickly faded. Now, as this large biography attests, there has been a revival of interest. Coe has ...

Weasel, Magpie, Crow

Mark Ford: Edward Thomas, 1 January 2009

Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems 
edited by Edna Longley.
Bloodaxe, 335 pp., £12, June 2008, 978 1 85224 746 1
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... in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in Edward Thomas’s mind: in May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate ...

Dreadful Apprehensions

Clare Bucknell: Collier and Fielding, 25 October 2018

The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable 
by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier, edited by Carolyn Woodward.
Kentucky, 406 pp., £86.50, November 2017, 978 0 8131 7410 5
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... thinks too much of herself; if she isn’t she doesn’t care enough (though here at least ‘she may thank God’, as Collier writes darkly in her Essay, ‘that her ugliness will preserve her from being a whore’). Portia and Cylinda have little time for the play-acting and suppressing of instincts this list of rules requires of women. The mixture of ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... an ambush ten days later. W.T. Cosgrave then succeeded to the leadership. The Civil War ended in May 1923 with the defeat of the Republicans. Three years later de Valera split from the Republicans and formed his own party, Fianna Fail, which entered the Dáil in 1927 and was elected to government in 1932. That the Dáil Government, operating underground ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...