Community Relations

Daniel Finn: In Belfast, 27 August 2009

“... them some kind of exhilaration.’ Anyone who has observed the response to mass immigration in France, Germany or Britain itself over the last couple of decades would find the attacks on Romanian families easy enough to understand. For once, there’s nothing exceptional about Northern Ireland: the statelet has recently become a net importer of human ...”

Common Ground

Edmund Leach, 19 September 1985

A Social History of Western Europe 1450-1720: Tensions and Solidarities among Rural People 
by Sheldon Watts.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £7.95, October 1984, 0 09 156081 0
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Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life 1500-1900 
by Andrejs Plakans.
Blackwell, 276 pp., £24.50, September 1984, 0 631 13066 7
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Interests and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship 
edited by Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean.
Cambridge, 417 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 521 24969 4
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“... and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social ...”

Do, Not, Love, Make, Beds

David Wheatley: Irish literary magazines, 3 June 2004

Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography 
Irish Academic, 318 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 7165 2751 0Show More
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“... in 1900. Clyde describes the Dublin Magazine as a provincial affair, whose flashes of interest in France and Russia cannot make up for the belletrist horror of yet another essay on Crabbe or Vaughan. His frequent references to the 1950s as a time of stagnation will not go down well with Gerry Smyth, whose study of 1950s journals in Decolonisation and ...”

At the Musée Jacquemart-André

Julian Bell: On Georges de La Tour, 22 January 2026

“... brothers’ pictures of feudal peasantry from two centuries earlier: in the middle lands between France and Germany, high art’s overview involved looking down. A snigger, even a shudder was in order: the current exhibition at Paris’s Musée Jacquemart-André, Georges de La Tour: Entre ombre et lumière (until 22 February), includes for comparison an ...”

Denatured

Rosemary Hill, 2 December 1993

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ‘The English Journey’ 
edited by David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann, translated by F. Gagna Walls.
Yale, 220 pp., £35, July 1993, 0 300 04117 9
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The Modernist Garden in France 
by Dorothée Imbert.
Yale, 268 pp., £40, August 1993, 0 300 04716 9
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“... art and architecture, in particular the Gothic and the landscape garden, had many admirers in France and Germany. Napoleon himself ordered Gothic furnishings from London. In the years after Waterloo it was inevitable that cultural tourists should flock to Britain to see at first hand what they had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance ...”

Upstaged in Palestine

Nigel Williams, 18 May 1989

Prisoner of Love 
by Jean Genet, translated by Barbara Bray.
Picador, 375 pp., £12.95, February 1989, 9780330299626
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“... scandal), but the fact that the reformatory was part of one of the most celebrated cathedrals of France, the Abbey of Fontevrault. Under a law of the Revolution, various charches were designated as penal institutions, and men in blue overalls can still be seen today cutting grass and wheeling barrows in the shadow of the spires and gargoyles tourists travel ...”

Merry Wife of Windsor

Patricia Beer, 16 October 1980

The Duchess of Windsor 
by Diana Mosley.
Sidgwick, 219 pp., £8.95, June 1980, 9780283986284
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“... VIII, ‘He has the secret of youth in the prime of age,’ whereas Ernest Simpson just called him Peter Pan.) In contributing The Duchess of Windsor, Diana Mosley has set herself a harder task than most. Her aims are good or at least interesting; their realisation was impossible. There is bound to be an element of moral judgment in any account of the ...”

Tough Morsels

Peter Rudnytsky, 7 November 1991

The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45 
edited by Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner.
Routledge, 958 pp., £100, December 1990, 0 415 03170 2
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“... institute in all of Great Britain, in contrast to the multiple training avenues available in France, Germany and the United States, and that the British Society suffers from a residual insularity and reluctance to forge alliances with the universities and other bodies in order to build a wider psychoanalytic culture. As Steiner points out, the ...”

Wright and Wrong

Peter Campbell, 10 November 1988

Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright 
by Brendan Gill.
Heinemann, 544 pp., £20, August 1988, 0 434 29273 7
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“... and Olgivanna, Wright’s third and last wife, who had been one of Gurdjieff’s disciples in France, had, Gill writes, ‘learned much from her years of sitting at his feet in the feudal establishment that that fiercely mustachioed old tartar had created at Fontainebleau’. When the time came, she showed a sure and self-protective sense of the ...”

Beyond Zero

Peter Wollen: Kazimir Malevich, 1 April 2004

Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism 
edited by Matthew Drutt.
Guggenheim, 296 pp., $65, June 2003, 0 89207 265 2
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“... following year, he attended the Golden Fleece Salon, an exhibition of two hundred paintings from France, including works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Degas, Signac, Van Gogh, Pissarro and many others – the Nabis, the Pointillists and, especially significant for Malevich, the Fauves, including Matisse. However, it was not until 1910, when he first met ...”

If Only Analogues...

Ange Mlinko: Ginsberg Goes to India, 20 November 2008

A Blue Hand: The Beats in India 
by Deborah Baker.
Penguin US, 256 pp., £25.95, April 2008, 978 1 59420 158 5
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“... or Paris, and some who vanish into history. We hopscotch between New York, San Francisco, Mexico, France, Morocco, India; we ricochet from Bombay to Delhi to Calcutta and Benares, with visits to sundry ashrams and temples in between: in Pondicherry, Tiruvannamalai, Mathura, Jaipur, Dharamsala. First we’re in 1962, then 1958, then 1948, then 1971. There’s ...”

The party’s over

Jan-Werner Müller, 22 May 2014

Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy 
by Peter Mair.
Verso, 174 pp., £15, June 2013, 978 1 84467 324 7
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“... ideologies, and there’s a problem when they don’t. What, then, do we really want from them? Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void offers some disturbing answers to this question. We remain in the dark about the strategies Mair might have recommended to address the crisis of Western democracy – he died of a heart attack in 2011 before his book was finished ...”

Wanted but Not Welcome

Jonathan Steele, 19 March 2020

The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present 
by Peter Gatrell.
Allen Lane, 548 pp., £30, August 2019, 978 0 241 29045 3
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“... was either downplayed or seen as a justifiable punishment. Ten million Germans suffered in what Peter Gatrell describes as ‘a reckoning on a grand and terrible scale’: 2.7 million were expelled from the Sudetenland and other parts of Czechoslovakia; six million were driven out of Poland and hundreds of thousands from Yugoslavia, Hungary and ...”

The Beast on My Back

Gerald Weissmann, 6 June 1996

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 
by Allan Young.
Princeton, 327 pp., £28, March 1996, 0 691 03352 8
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“... in the Western Desert and by spring he was back in action. On 9 June, three days after landing in France, he was killed behind enemy lines. We can trace the beast to a passage in From Alamein to Zem Zem, in which he describes his escape from a blasted tank over a minefield of wrecked armour and oil-stained corpses: Presently I saw two men crawling on the ...”

Porter for Leader

Jenny Diski, 8 December 1994

London: A Social History 
by Roy Porter.
Hamish Hamilton, 429 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 241 12944 3
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A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650-1750 
by Peter Earle.
Methuen, 321 pp., £25, April 1994, 9780413681706
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“... it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte blanche. The free-for-all continued, with neither local nor Parliamentary government overseeing London’s growth, until the setting up of the London ...”