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Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...

The Basic Couple

Benjamin Kunkel: Norman Rush, 24 October 2013

Subtle Bodies 
by Norman Rush.
Granta, 234 pp., £14.99, October 2013, 978 1 84708 780 5
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... and the question animating Mortals is whether she has fallen in love with a better man. Dr Davis Morel is a social reformer – he wants to de-Christianise Africa – with an encyclopedic mind and a touch of the crank about him. He resembles Nelson Denoon, with the important difference that Morel is black. (Not that race counts for as much as might be ...

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

... said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career seemed well washed up, are in charge of our Euro negotiations. On the eve of the referendum, Johnson claimed that Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references without their being explained? How are such links forged? The ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
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Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
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... the invention of hieroglyphics by a god, in Plato’s story in the Phaedrus, refuses it, as John Ray recalled in these pages, ‘because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration’. Television stands accused of promoting apathy and inertia, pocket calculators of the decay of mental arithmetic. Often technology is blamed for an ...

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
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A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
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... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...

Vuvuzelas Unite

Andy Beckett: The Trade Union Bill, 22 October 2015

Trade Union Bill (HC Bill 58) 
Stationery Office, 32 pp., July 2015Show More
Trade Union Membership 2014: Statistical Bulletin 
Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 56 pp., June 2015Show More
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... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The next ...

Honey, I forgot to duck

Jackson Lears: Reagan’s Make-Believe, 23 January 2025

Reagan: His Life and Legend 
by Max Boot.
Liveright, 836 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 87140 944 7
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... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...

In Praise of Mess

Richard Poirier: Walt Whitman, 4 June 1998

With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. VIII: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., $99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 8 5
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With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. IX: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., £99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 9 3
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... in Whitman, just as Whitman’s many early admirers in England had done, like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who seemed primarily taken with his poetry because it spoke for and to gay men like themselves. He is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope ...

A Comet that Bodes Mischief

Sophie Smith: Women in Philosophy, 25 April 2024

How to Think like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind 
by Regan Penaluna.
Grove, 296 pp., £9.99, March, 978 1 80471 002 9
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The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy 
edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro.
Routledge, 638 pp., £215, June 2023, 978 1 138 21275 6
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... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... psychedelic guru Ram Dass put it, to ‘be here now.’The same year that Suzuki arrived, Ronald Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which still stages free outdoor performances of raucously political theatre. The Sierra Club was expanding from its roots as a California-based mountaineering club with some achievements in conservation into a national ...

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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... this Hollywood dreck, Ben?’ Roth wanted to know, ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the ...

Military to Military

Seymour M. Hersh, 7 January 2016

... after crossing the border into Syria. In January 2014, despairing at the lack of progress, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, summoned American and Sunni Arab intelligence chiefs from throughout the Middle East to a secret meeting in Washington, with the aim of persuading Saudi Arabia to stop supporting extremist fighters in Syria. ‘The Saudis ...

Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
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... their equivalent in the 2005 reissue of Our Island Story by the right-wing think-tank Civitas. John Clare, the education editor of the Daily Telegraph, appealed to his readers for donations to support this project. ‘They responded by sending in an astonishing £25,000.’ There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...

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