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Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... with Wilde, he wrote her a letter in a tone more pompous than Lady Bracknell at the height of her powers: ‘As for my calling at Harcourt Street, you know, my dear Florence, that such a thing is quite out of the question: it would have been unfair to you, and me, and to the man you are going to marry, had we met anywhere else but under your mother’s ...
... a teenager called Amy in Amis Senior’s The Green Man, who is a fan of a pop-star called Jonathan Swift.Reading twenty-odd reviews of the same book was (for me) an unusual and unnerving experience. The dominant impression created by this bizarre over-exposure was of an aggregation of nervous tics so enormous that one had to think of them as cultural ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... porn; campaigns in favour of global warming and freedom for corporations. Monbiot also follows Jonathan Matthews of Lobbywatch in reporting curious clusters of former LM contributors now working in public science education. For example, according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... its medical industries. The US has provided some of the WHO’s most dynamic figures, notably Jonathan Mann, who led the organisation’s response to the spread of Aids in the 1980s. In narrative fiction and non-fiction, a stock figure has emerged: the brave, principled, maverick American researcher who leaves the safety of the homeland to plunge into the ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... Brown was another story). The members of Budd’s commission included the political philosopher Jonathan Wolff and the sports journalist Mihir Bose. The report they produced in 2001, for the newly created Department for Culture, Media and Sport, was intelligent and elegantly written, but unlike the Rothschild report, it was also pretty forthright. It turned ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... the greatest thoroughbred runs in American letters, but even as Roth assumed full command of his powers, the controlled burn of his anger and vivacity, he would be sidelined and knocked flat by health problems that would have tried a saint, and he was no saint. It was as if his body was booby-trapped: a ruptured appendix in 1967 (‘spreading deadly bacteria ...

One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... for any posterity. It is noticeable that the one outstanding exception, the remarkable work of Jonathan Zittell Smith, a brilliant mind by any measure, should avoid so much as a mention of Weber’s name in connection with his subject. In it comparison alters focus, completely. Taking not only an expressly anthropological approach to the study of ...

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