The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

... to the ‘lineage history’ (vamshvāli) which is a strong tradition among Keralan Christians. In Robert Eric Frykenberg’s Christianity in India, vamshvālis are described as orally transmitted pedigrees which ‘claim hereditary authority within certain elite families, through which kattanars [pastors] and metrans [bishops] descended from one generation to ...

Laptop Jihadi

Adam Shatz: Theoretician of al-Qaida, 20 March 2008

Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri 
by Brynjar Lia.
Hurst, 510 pp., £27.50, November 2007, 978 1 85065 856 6
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... sources, more likely to cite Mao than Muhammad: in Afghanistan he was known for giving lectures on Robert Taber’s 1965 study of guerrilla movements, The War of the Flea, once a favourite of the IRA. Al-Suri, Lia writes, was ‘a dissident, a critic and an intellectual in an ideological current in which one would expect to find obedience rather than ...

Entrepreneurship

Tom Paulin: Ted Hughes and the Hare, 29 November 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 756 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 571 22138 7
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... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...

Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

... but he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter – another cattle king hotel – is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie ...

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America 
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9
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... from Essex, desperate to find food, sailed a shallop down the New England coast accompanied by his young daughter and two others. A storm drove them to Cape Cod, where feet had to be chipped away from the ice in the boat. They tried to make a fire, but had no hatchet to cut wood. The party lay exposed to the cold all night. Everyone except the girl and one ...

His Own Dark Mind

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron, 30 November 2023

Byron and the Poetics of Adversity 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £19.99, December 2022, 978 1 009 23295 1
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Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics 
by Bernard Beatty.
Liverpool, 266 pp., £90, January 2023, 978 1 80085 462 8
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Byron’s ‘Don Juan’: The Liberal Epic of the 19th Century 
by Richard Cronin.
Cambridge, 248 pp., £85, June 2023, 978 1 009 36623 6
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... When, at the beginning of the canto, ‘self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,’ the young hero finds himself, not coincidentally, ‘upon this place of skulls,/The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo’. Why not glimpse personal calamity in a generation’s burial place? (‘He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
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... the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded convention’ that Sturges acquired at a young age through his exposure to ‘boulevardier sophistication and bohemian élan’. But his aim is to identify in the films a counteracting ‘democratic impulse’: a belief that the ‘gaiety of invention’ afforded by language can serve as a vital ...

Sunday Best

Mark Ford: Wilfred Owen’s Letters, 26 September 2024

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen 
edited by Jane Potter.
Oxford, 436 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 19 968950 7
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... understanding view, and may even have accused Owen of cowardice, a slur that found its way into Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. But the army should be given credit for the treatment Owen received at hospitals in France and Hampshire, and then at Craiglockhart, where Arthur Brock implemented a regime that he called ‘ergotherapy’, a kind of ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... very centre of its inside; what seemed circumstantial has been redefined as constitutive.’ As Robert Scholes put it, we must ‘make the object of study the whole intertextual system of relations that connects one text to others ... the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies’. That is, he continues, ‘in order to ...

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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... warned that ‘people, including politicians of all parties, are worried by the failure of many young people now to engage with the institutions of the free society they live in.’ Denied access to the pieties of Our Island Story, a generation of misguided eco-protesters and climate-camp activists might find themselves on the wrong island, at Kingsnorth ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...

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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... might help prop him up in his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... not have any Emily Dickinson at all.Born in Cambridge in 1856, Mabel Loomis was convinced from a young age of her own ‘all-embracing genius’. Polly Longsworth, who has edited her love letters to Austin, writes that for Mabel ‘a public parlour or dining room comprised a small stage which she learned to dominate with her conversational and artistic gifts ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a ...