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The Knock at the Door

Philip Clark: The Complete Mozart, 8 February 2018

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The New Complete Edition 
Universal Classics, £275, October 2016Show More
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... mirrors that cultural shift by privileging performances by Brüggen, Gardiner and Pinnock over Karl Böhm, George Szell and Eugen Jochum, pillars of the Austro-German tradition whose interpretations are now discreetly tucked away as ‘supplementary’ performances, historical oddities. Böhm never gets the notes wrong, but his orchestral plod suffocates ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... of rescue, and pansexual before that term was in use. (He sometimes slept with his friend, the French actor Christian Marquand.) Mann uses that New School punch-up to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he ...

What should the action be?

Greg Afinogenov: Anarchism’s Failure, 4 May 2023

Russian Populism: A History 
by Christopher Ely.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £24.99, February 2022, 978 1 350 09553 3
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Mutual Aid 
by Peter Kropotkin.
Penguin, 320 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 0 241 35533 6
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... enhanced in Russia by an incomprehension that was sometimes literal: young nobles often learned French first and spoke Russian only with difficulty.By the 19th century, however, educated elites all over Europe were drawn, whether by poetry, paintings or music, towards a romantic notion of the rural poor. The beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and ...

Kurt Waldheim’s Past

Gitta Sereny, 21 April 1988

Waldheim 
by Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen.
Robson, 192 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 86051 506 0
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Waldheim: The Missing Years 
by Robert Edwin Herzstein.
Grafton, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 246 13381 3
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... in Alsace was found with ease by journalists, but who remained ‘introuvable’ by the French Police. Is it conceivable that this was because the witness might have disproved the involvement of Barbie in the most heinous crime of which he was accused, the only one that clearly came under the heading of a ‘crime against humanity’, which, since ...

The Prisoner of Spandau

Alan Milward, 7 August 1986

My Father Rudolf Hess 
by Wolf Rüdiger Hess, translated by Fred Crowley.
W.H. Allen, 414 pp., £14.95, March 1986, 0 491 03772 4
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Long Knives and Short Memories: The Spandau Prison Story 
by Jack Fishman.
Souvenir, 474 pp., £15.95, June 1986, 0 285 62688 4
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Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik 
by Gisela Bock.
Westdeutscher Verlag, 494 pp., April 1986, 3 531 11759 9
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Prelude to Genocide: Nazi Ideology and the Struggle for Power 
by Simon Taylor.
Duckworth, 228 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 0 7156 1872 5
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... in July 1947, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, walked out of discussions with his British and French counterparts about the American offer of Marshall Aid; Europe was divided, east and west; and the seven surviving major Nazi war criminals who had been tried and condemned by the victorious allies at Nuremberg were moved, the subject of a special ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... Johnson’s veneration started a fashion which lasted long after Burke’s death. By 1856, Karl Marx, who himself denounced Burke as a sycophant and ‘out-and-out vulgar bourgeois’, was also telling the readers of the New York Daily Tribune that he was ‘the man who is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen’. Burke was ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and waited in the bone-numbing cold for four hours to hear the podium speeches of the party cadres. As Hobsbawm would recall much later, there was singing – ‘The ...

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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... thus takes the story quickly from magic and mystery to the early 20th-century achievements of Karl Landsteiner, who identified the ABO blood groups; Richard Lewisohn, who discovered that sodium citrate would keep blood from coagulating; and Alexis Carrel, whose brilliant suturing of a father’s artery to the tiny, delicate vein of his infant daughter’s ...

Axeman as Ballroom Dancer

David Blackbourn, 17 July 1997

Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987 
by Richard J. Evans.
Oxford, 1014 pp., £55, March 1996, 0 19 821968 7
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... most early German commentators. Kant insisted on the importance of retributive justice; even Karl Ferdinand Hommel, the ‘German Beccaria’, parted from his mentor over the death penalty. But abolitionist sentiment grew in the first half of the 19th century. Capital punishment offended liberal belief in the moral rehabilitation of the offender, and the ...

Be a lamp unto yourself

John Lanchester, 5 May 1988

S.: A Novel 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 244 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 233 98255 8
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... to make that range of reference credible: she did two years in college, specialising in modern French philosophy, though ‘all I remember now is essence procedes existence or is it the other way around?’) The novel is full of these moments of translation, which often work to broaden the humour that is always latent in Updike’s prose – the sly ...

Revolution strikes the eye

John Willett, 19 January 1989

Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde 
by Constantin Rudnitsky, translated by Roxane Permar.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £40, April 1988, 0 500 01433 7
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The ‘Golden’ Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic 
by Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Schebera, translated by Katherine Vanovitch.
Yale, 271 pp., £25, April 1988, 0 300 04144 6
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... All I can say is: “Vive la république!” ’ say the double-chinned dinner-jacketed slobs in Karl Arnold’s caricature, while Toller, ignored by director and designer, stares out sadly from the photograph on the opposite page. Jürgen Schebera has already published a brilliantly-illustrated short biography of Kurt Weill, and one can only gape at his ...

Read, rattle and roll

Malcolm Deas, 6 February 1986

Holy Smoke 
by G. Cabrera Infante.
Faber, 329 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 571 13518 8
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Tobacco on the Periphery. A Case Study in Cuban Labour History: 1860-1958 
by Jean Stubbs.
Cambridge, 203 pp., £25, April 1985, 9780521254236
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... motley mahogany: yes, I remember it well) to hold it to her lovely earlobe and rolled it between French finger and thin thumb to listen better to – to what for heaven’s sake? Tobacco termites working nights Chez Maxim? The sound of a cigar being gently crushed to pieces by a feminine hand? (In the trade this is called ‘listening to the ...

Not a Pretty Sight

Jenny Diski: Who Are You Calling Ugly?, 24 January 2008

On Ugliness 
edited by Umberto Eco.
Harvill Secker, 455 pp., £30, October 2007, 978 1 84655 122 2
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... nothing like the analysis that is available for the nature and history of beauty. An exception is Karl Rosenkrantz’s The Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853), but he takes the idea far away from opposition to mere beauty: ‘Flatulence is an ugly business in all circumstances. But since it is a sign that the liberty of man is not always entirely under his control ...

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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... writer without being truly part of his or her work. Not every text which bears the signature of Karl Marx is necessarily ‘Marxist’. There is a difference between what Middlemarch is seeking to do at any particular point, and what George Eliot had in mind at the time, if she had anything particular in mind at all. The literary intentions that matter are ...

Monobeing

Brian Rotman: Why did the eternal one arrive so late?, 17 February 2005

God: An Itinerary 
by Régis Debray.
Verso, 307 pp., £25, March 2004, 1 85984 589 4
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... the interconnections between base and superstructure behind the historical materialism of Karl Marx. For Debray, the goal is to dissolve the conventional barriers separating culture from technology, to think of them not as irrevocable antagonists, but ‘one by the other, one with the other’. One consequence of deliberately interlacing cultural ...

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