Space Wars

Fredric Jameson, 4 April 1996

The Invisible in Architecture 
edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn.
Academy, 516 pp., $115, February 1994, 1 85490 285 7
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The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism 
by Roger Scruton.
Carcanet, 158 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 1 85754 054 9
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... not a stroll among the great monuments of a now canonised modern period – a diving bell into Post-Modernity, if you will. This term must be understood as referring to a scene and historical situation, rather than designating a style itself by now relatively antiquated (of the great Post-Modernist names – Charles Moore, for instance – very ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... picture deserves, like four out of five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry “Unclean, unclean”.’ Over longer stretches the tone is agreeable, modulated, full of resources, the voice of a man who has had plenty of time to think, but it can be indolent to the point of nervelessness. Thus of Elizabeth Taylor in National ...

What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra: Closing Time, 21 September 2017

The Retreat of Western Liberalism 
by Edward Luce.
Little, Brown, 240 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 4087 1041 8
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The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea 
by Bill Emmott.
Economist, 257 pp., £22, May 2017, 978 1 61039 780 3
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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics 
by David Goodhart.
Hurst, 256 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 799 9
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The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 143 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam 
by Douglas Murray.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 4729 4224 1
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... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...

Frisking the Bishops

Ferdinand Mount: Poor Henry, 21 September 2023

Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement 1258-72 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 711 pp., £30, May, 978 0 300 24805 0
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Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule 1207-58 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 763 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 300 25919 3
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... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...

Its Rolling Furious Eyes

James Vincent: Automata, 22 February 2024

Miracles and Machines: A 16th-Century Automaton and Its Legend 
by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd.
Getty, 245 pp., £39.99, August 2023, 978 1 60606 839 7
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... Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the ...

Maigret’s Room

John Lanchester: The Home Life of Inspector Maigret, 4 June 2020

... The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is called in French: Pietr the Latvian. Similarly, the second Maigret, another of my favourites, Le Charretier de ‘la Providence’, also from 1931, has ...

Unhoused

Terry Eagleton: Anonymity, 22 May 2008

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature 
by John Mullan.
Faber, 374 pp., £17.99, January 2008, 978 0 571 19514 5
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... the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...

Woolsorters’ Disease

Hugh Pennington: The history of anthrax, 29 November 2001

... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...

New Looks, New Newspapers

Peter Campbell, 2 June 1988

The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 
by Jon Wozencroft.
Thames and Hudson, 160 pp., £14.95, April 1988, 0 500 27496 7
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The Making of the ‘Independent’ 
by Michael Crozier.
Gordon Fraser, 128 pp., £8.95, May 1988, 0 86092 107 7
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... a young City shit, can, for example, be very funny, but it does not, as the excesses of Steve Bell in the Guardian sometimes do, manage to shock you at your acquiescence in the status quo. ‘As the principles’ of the new paper ‘clarified’, Crozier writes, it seemed to journalists wishing to join it ‘almost too good to be true’:   On economic ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... have noticed that Professor Pierson sounded a good deal like Orson Welles, as did that man on the bell tower watching the tripods cross the river with enormous strides. But to have noticed the odd resemblance probably would not have comforted anyone already hooked; it might have made things even eerier. After all, it was all happening ‘before your very ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... channel AMC, credits Evans with mentoring her in her earlier career as a screenwriter. In 2020 David Zaslav, head of the Warner-Discovery conglomerate that includes HBO, bought and renovated Evans’s home in Beverly Hills. Biskind writes that the househad seen its share of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll, had succumbed to weeds, rot and decay, and become a ...

Emily v. Mabel

Susan Eilenberg: Emily Dickinson, 30 June 2011

Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Virago, 491 pp., £9.99, April 2011, 978 1 84408 453 1
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Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 535 pp., £25.95, September 2010, 978 0 674 04867 6
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... With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space – began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here – And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing – then – The writing of such a poem ...

When the Costume Comes Off

Adam Mars-Jones: Philip Hensher, 14 April 2011

King of the Badgers 
by Philip Hensher.
Fourth Estate, 436 pp., £18.99, March 2011, 978 0 00 730133 1
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... learn, a sexual signal pitched above heterosexual hearing. Mauro is in town with homely, miserable David, who imagines that his parents will be reassured to see him with someone so personable and charming. Mauro isn’t a paid escort, although David has lent him money that isn’t going to come back, and this is a small way ...