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Angering and Agitating

Christopher Turner: Freud’s fan club, 30 November 2006

Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones 
by Brenda Maddox.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 7195 6792 0
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... took charge of the psychoanalytic movement. Jones saw himself in the same relationship to Freud as Thomas Huxley had been to Darwin; both he and Huxley, Jones wrote, were ‘bonny fighters’. Huxley described himself as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and Maddox’s title refers to Jones as ‘Freud’s wizard’, but he was more commonly known as ‘Freud’s ...

Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie

Alex Abramovich: ‘Country Music’, 8 October 2020

Country Music 
directed by Ken Burns.
PBS, eight episodes
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... after white supremacists held their ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had ...

Praeludium of a Grunt

Tom Crewe: Charles Lamb’s Lives, 19 October 2023

Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb 
by Eric G. Wilson.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 300 23080 2
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... most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas Fuller and Tristram Shandy on its sleeve. At other times it has a tart poeticism: ‘He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.’ Or exhibits that proto-Dickensian habit of comic ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... to London, Magee played Mr Slocum in that same first production of All That Fall, directed by Donald McWhinnie, in which Jack MacGowran had taken part. It was hearing this voice faintly in France through the ether as broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957 – reading an extract from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work, also directed by ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted ...

After the Fall

John Lanchester: Ten Years after the Crash, 5 July 2018

... 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – which to many close observers of Labour politics is actually the least likely thing on that list. The ...

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... constraints, to emerge. But one can’t generalise. Some émigrés are obsessed by the fatherland: Donald Davie goes transatlantic and promptly writes The Shires. Others adapt without fuss: Prince Charles, when traversing North America last year, announced his allegiance to the Reflective Sublime. ‘I rather feel,’ he declared, ‘that deep in the soul of ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to ‘American’ Modernism, just as the more recent poems of Charles Tomlinson seemed touched by the dotty magniloquence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... and religious environments, and were conceived as both summations of and short cuts to learning. Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus Florum (‘Handful of Flowers’) was compiled in Paris around 1306. It lists quotations under topical headings such as ‘superbia’ (pride) and ‘perseverantia’ (perseverance). Thomas’s ...

Get knitting

Ian Hacking: Birth and Death of the Brain, 18 August 2005

The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind 
by Steven Rose.
Cape, 344 pp., £20, March 2005, 0 224 06254 9
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... work was David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996): ‘Consciousness is the biggest mystery.’ Thomas Huxley wrote, 140 years ago: We class sensations along with emotions and volitions and thoughts, under the common head of states of consciousness. But what consciousness is, we know not, and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... had Persian names; two later children, born to his Persian wife, Sima, were called Maria and Thomas.) Between 1925 and 1940, he was really all over the place – not that that couldn’t be said about the time before and much of the time after as well. He came and went between Rapallo and England, where he took a job as a music critic; he did good ...

She gives me partridges

Bee Wilson: Alma Mahler, 5 November 2015

Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler 
by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Donald Arthur.
Northeastern, 360 pp., £29, May 2015, 978 1 55553 789 0
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... and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he had been such a prominent opponent of Nazism. After all, she was an ...

Find the Method

Timothy Shenk: Loyalty to Marx, 29 June 2017

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion 
by Gareth Stedman Jones.
Penguin, 768 pp., £14.99, May 2017, 978 0 14 102480 6
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... exploitation and misery’ – while reaping its benefits, uncovering a road that led from Thomas Paine to Tony Blair. Settling his account with Marxism required a reckoning with Marx himself. As early as 1979, when Stedman Jones still identified as a socialist, he was exhorting his comrades to ‘de-theologise Marx’. Marxists had produced brilliant ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie ...

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
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Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
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Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
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... Europeans seeking to surrender military responsibilities in exchange for wealth and comfort. Donald Trump expresses something close to this sentiment in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David ...

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