Short Cuts

Tony Wood: Javier Milei’s Agenda, 14 December 2023

... something Macri, Bullrich et al see as preferable to the continuation of Kirchnerismo. They may be betting that Milei’s need for their support will enable them to temper his more extreme ideas. Though Milei’s coalition, La Libertad Avanza, gained 34 congressional deputies and eight senate seats in the October elections, it remains far short of a ...

Abridged Cow Skeleton

Josie Mitchell: Kate Riley’s ‘Ruth’, 20 November 2025

Ruth 
by Kate Riley.
Doubleday, 248 pp., £16.99, August, 978 0 85752 988 6
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... while treating intellect as a barrier to faith. Ruth worries that, given her shortcomings, she may never marry. A brother can ask permission to begin correspondence with a baptised sister, but all ‘licit courtship’ is mediated by the elders. Since there are fewer men than women in the Brotherhood, the elders decide who will remain ...

Chop and Burn

Adam Mars-Jones: Annie Proulx, 28 July 2016

Barkskins 
by Annie Proulx.
Fourth Estate, 717 pp., £18.99, June 2016, 978 0 00 723200 0
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... why should carpenters be so disparaged when loggers and sawyers go uncriticised? The answer may be the reluctant admiration for cutters and processors of wood aroused by the vast amount of research Proulx has done into the history of the timber trade, despite her ambition in this book to restore a sense of the sacredness of the forest. The jobs ...

The Terrifying Vrooom

Colin Burrow: Empsonising, 15 July 2021

Some Versions of Pastoral 
by William Empson, edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 496 pp., £80, November 2020, 978 0 19 965966 1
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The Structure of Complex Words 
by William Empson, edited by Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 672 pp., £95, November 2020, 978 0 19 871343 2
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... a bottom-up view of human society depicted through a representative socially low figure. Then you may think: aw, come off it. Read what it says on the label and stop being so darned clever: you can’t take the pastor out of pastoral without collapsing it into all things.Empson’s belief in the plurality of diverse elements within texts and within societies ...

Death and the Maiden

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 6 August 1981

Alice James 
by Jean Strouse.
Cape, 367 pp., £9.95, February 1981, 0 224 01436 6
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The Death and Letters of Alice James 
edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell.
California, 214 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 520 03745 6
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... possess one’s soul in silence.’ She wrote this in the diary she began when she was 40, so it may be that her memory was coloured by the experiences of adult life. But when she was 17, William, on an expedition in Brazil, sent his love to Henry and Alice and asked: ‘Does the latter continue to wish she was dead?’ It ...

The Chief Inhabitant

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jerusalem, 14 July 2011

Jerusalem: The Biography 
by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Weidenfeld, 638 pp., £25, January 2011, 978 0 297 85265 0
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... place name: Salem was a city set on a hill for a newly founded Puritan Israel. Armchair travellers may prefer to turn to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of ...

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

... grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended ...

Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
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Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
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... lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All those who knew him well were impressed, and by now almost ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... world is clasped in their tenacious tendrils and covered with your verdant love. In the end you may even shed all sense of separate selfhood as you learn, with Spinoza or Hegel, that there is no true identity short of an all-encompassing God. Charity, it appears, begins in your own mind. We all started out, as Freud put it, with a cheerful ...

Finding an Enemy

Conor Gearty: Sixty Years of Anti-Terrorist Legislation, 15 April 1999

Legislation against Terrorism: A Consultation Paper. CM 4178. 
by Home Office and Northern Ireland Office.
70 pp., £9.95, December 1998, 0 10 141782 9
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... expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May 1940, a total of 167 expulsion orders had been made, statistics which ignore the substantial emigration of the Irish from Britain following the Act. Originally due to expire on 28 July 1941, it was kept in force until the end of that year under wartime powers ...

What happened to the Labour Party?

W.G. Runciman: The difference between then and now, 22 June 2006

... of social benefit with the minimum of economic disturbance.’ The carefully balanced antitheses may come over a little too rhetorically now, but they encapsulate exactly what many in the Labour Party would have agreed that they had in mind. The third principle was the protection of the legitimate interests of organised labour in the face of the traditional ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its pomp. Reference works and biographies make it plain that these figures could collectively boast a remarkable level of official recognition (or at least would come to do so before their ...

Howzat?

Stephen Sedley: Adversarial or Inquisitorial?, 25 September 2003

The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial 
by John Langbein.
Oxford, 376 pp., £30, February 2003, 0 19 925888 0
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Archbold: International Criminal Courts 
edited by Rodney Dixon, Richard May and Karim Khan.
Sweet and Maxwell, 1000 pp., £125, December 2002, 0 421 77270 0
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... does not argue for a return to the old English system; he accepts that ‘two-sided partisanship may indeed have been better than one-sided partisanship’; but he advocates a resumption of the search for the truth – whatever that signifies – by means of a modern inquisitorial system. The suggestion that modern inquisitorial procedures are superior to ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... those interested in the Sonnets, or students of the lyric, or ‘poets hungry for resource’, may want to browse in. She has included a recording of some of the Sonnets read aloud, because the three other readings available are done by actors (who???) who, typically I would say, speak the lines with constant mis-emphases and ignore the inner antitheses ...

Squadrons of Pigs

Stefan Collini: Bonfire of the Universities, 4 June 2026

... are thought to be at risk of closure and when research council funding of the physical sciences may in some cases be reduced by as much as 30 per cent in proposals that are said to threaten ‘generational destruction’ in those fields; when undergraduates are taught in very large groups, with limited opportunities for personal contact with an established ...