‘I merely belong to them’

Judith Butler: Hannah Arendt, 10 May 2007

The Jewish Writings 
by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman.
Schocken, 559 pp., $35, March 2007, 978 0 8052 4238 6
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... You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... rates. He replaced Janet Yellen, a high-profile Obama appointee, with a mainstream figure, Jerome Powell, who has continued the policies of ‘normalisation’ Yellen began: ending quantitative easing and gradually raising interest rates. These moves are counter to hopes of breakneck economic growth, and should there ...

Keynesian in a Foxhole

Geoff Mann: The Monetarist Position, 13 April 2023

A Fiscal and Monetary History of the United States, 1961-2021 
by Alan Blinder.
Princeton, 432 pp., £35, October 2022, 978 0 691 23838 8
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... crisis, Blinder’s Princeton colleague Ben Bernanke, is one of the book’s heroes. Another is Jerome ‘Jay’ Powell, who was appointed Fed chair by Trump – the only thing Trump did that Blinder thinks was a good idea. Powell, he writes, ‘had greatness thrust upon him’, leading the central bank through the stormy ...

Death in Greece

Marilyn Butler, 17 September 1981

Byron’s Letter and Journals. Vol. XI: For Freedom’s Battle 
edited by Leslie Marchand.
Murray, 243 pp., £11.50, April 1981, 0 7195 3792 4
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Byron: The Complete Poetical Works 
edited by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 464 pp., £35, October 1980, 0 19 811890 2
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Red Shelley 
by Paul Foot.
Sidgwick, 293 pp., £12.95, May 1981, 0 283 98679 4
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Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile 
by Glauco Cambon.
Princeton, 360 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 691 06424 5
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... We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered Byron’s whole life. J.J. McGann’s complete edition of the poems is proceeding expeditiously: the three volumes to date include all the poems written before Byron left England in 1816, and Volume II has the whole of the masterpiece Childe Harold, including Cantos III and IV, which were written in exile in 1816 and 1818 ...

The European (Re)discovery of the Shamans

Carlo Ginzburg, 28 January 1993

... have anything comparable to the five-volume historical, rational and systematic bibliography that Jerome Brooks started publishing in 1937 under the title Tobacco, to guide us on the use of marijuana, opium and coca. The hypotheses which I am about to formulate are therefore very much subject to correction on the basis of ...

Inspiration, Accident, Genius

Helen Vendler, 16 October 1997

Keats 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 612 pp., £25, October 1997, 9780571172276
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... imposition of a specific political event on Keats’s later poetry is the assertion (initiated by Jerome McGann, and recently ratified by Nicholas Roe in The Culture of Dissent) that the shadow of the Peterloo Massacre (which occurred a month before the poem was written) hangs over the ode ‘To Autumn’. Even Motion ...

Death (and Life) of the Author

Peter Wollen: Kathy Acker, 5 February 1998

... really plagiarism because she was quite open about what she did). She was also influenced by Jerome Rothenberg, a poet who was loosely attached to the Beat writers, but whose profounder sympathies were with the European avant-garde, especially French Surrealism and German Expressionism. Thus the influence of ...

Barbecue of the Vanities

Steven Shapin: Big Food, 22 August 2002

Eating Right in the Renaissance 
by Ken Albala.
California, 315 pp., £27.95, February 2002, 0 520 22947 9
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Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health 
by Marion Nestle.
California, 457 pp., £19.95, February 2002, 0 520 22465 5
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... wrong as anything could be and as physiologically natural as it was possible to imagine. St Jerome was said to have been shocked to witness the Scots enjoying a meal of swineherd buttock and maiden’s breast, and a late 16th-century writer noted that cannibals accounted human flesh ‘the sweetest meat of all ...

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity 
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5
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... AT 8 p.m.​ on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the mouth and, finally, the full portrait ...

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

... I enjoyed lots of things: our lovely friends and vows and gold rings, the champagne brunch and Jerome Kern songs, my formerly aghast but now resigned eighty-something mother trundling up from San Diego for the ceremony, and the deliciously dark poem Blakey’s prodigy-niece, the only six-year-old I know capable of ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... Like making jokes or copulating without regard to season, torturing is one of those activities that distinguish human beings from other animals. Inflicted both on our congeners and on other species, it marks us out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do ...

Love Stories

Edmund White, 4 November 1993

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life: A Novel 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by Linda Coverdale.
Quartet, 246 pp., £12.95, November 1991, 9780704370005
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The Man in the Red Hat 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by James Kirkup.
Quartet, 111 pp., £12.95, May 1993, 0 7043 7046 8
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The Compassion Protocol 
by Hervé Guibert, translated by James Kirkup.
Quartet, 202 pp., £13.95, October 1993, 9780704370593
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... Hervé Guibert died on 27 December 1991 from complications resulting from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He had been ill with Aids for several years and in 1990 had made a spectacular appearance on French television during which he’d discussed his illness and the book he’d written about it, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. The thousands of letters he received as a result encouraged him to write another book, The Compassion Protocol, and to participate in another prime-time interview ...

House-Cleaning

David Bromwich: I met a Republican, 7 March 2019

... lying to Congress and witness tampering. His alleged collaborators in the Trump-WikiLeaks affair, Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico, have been subpoenaed by Mueller. Some protection may be afforded Trump by his nominee as attorney general, William Barr, a right-wing Republican who believes in a strong chief executive; on 14 ...

Pomenvylopes

Mark Ford: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts, 19 June 2014

The Gorgeous Nothings 
by Emily Dickinson.
New Directions, 255 pp., £26.50, October 2013, 978 0 8112 2175 7
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The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping 
by Francis Nenik, translated by Katy Derbyshire.
Readux, 64 pp., £3, October 2013, 978 3 944801 00 1
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... ment [on added triangle of envelope – with ‘of’ and ‘I’ in margin].’ ‘I found it by accident,’ Werner writes, ‘in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... Yellen, the Fed chair. But he was more restrained after he took office, and his appointment of Jerome Powell as her successor was arguably his most important concession to mainstream policy opinion. Needless to say, Trump is no respecter of the Fed’s ‘independence’. When it began tightening interest rates in 2018 ...