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Sisters come second

Dinah Birch: Siblings, 26 April 2012

Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations 1780-1920 
by Leonore Davidoff.
Oxford, 449 pp., £35, November 2011, 978 0 19 954648 0
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... hate like brothers’ hate.’ We had heard of Cain and Abel, the first pair of brothers. ‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.’ We knew about Jacob and Esau too, and thought Esau entirely in the right. ‘And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him.’ These were not encouraging precedents. Despite such ...

Honest Lies

Michael Wood: Jean Giono, 27 July 2023

Ennemonde 
by Jean Giono, translated by Bill Johnston.
Archipelago, 171 pp., £12.99, September 2021, 978 1 953861 12 2
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The Open Road 
by Jean Giono, translated by Paul Eprile.
NYRB, 212 pp., £13.99, October 2021, 978 1 68137 510 6
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A King Alone 
by Jean Giono, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 155 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 1 68137 309 6
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... At first no bodies are found, so the people are simply missing. Giono uses careful language to mark this mystery (‘must have gone’, ‘disappeared from the face of the earth’) as if it were impolitic to assume or speak of direct violence. Then the bodies are discovered hanging in a tree, and the killer, a certain Monsieur V., is tracked down. The ...

Getting it right

Tam Dalyell, 18 July 1985

The Ponting Affair 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
Cecil Woolf, 144 pp., £5.95, June 1985, 0 900821 74 4
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Who Killed Hilda Murrell? 
by Judith Cook.
New English Library, 182 pp., £1.95, June 1985, 0 450 05885 9
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... Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a gentleman should by going along to the Old Bailey to face the music. This is a view I have heard from ...

On Compost

Fraser MacDonald, 17 April 2025

... is never quite the same. But I always include two staples: fibrous material like wood chippings or rose prunings to create tiny air pockets. Then water. After that, it just takes time. There’s a eucharistic mystery to the biochemical transformations that follow. Things fall apart. They decompose and recompose. Thermophilic microbes foment anarchy in the ...

Keeping up the fight

Paul Delany, 24 January 1991

D.H. Lawrence: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Macmillan, 446 pp., £19.95, August 1990, 0 333 49247 1
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D.H. Lawrence 
by Tony Pinkney.
Harvester, 180 pp., £30, June 1990, 0 7108 1347 3
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England, My England, and Other Stories 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Bruce Steele.
Cambridge, 285 pp., £37.50, March 1990, 0 521 35267 3
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The ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ Trial (Regina v. Penguin Books Limited) 
edited by H. Montgomery Hyde.
Bodley Head, 333 pp., £18, June 1990, 0 370 31105 1
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Boy 
by James Hanley.
Deutsch, 191 pp., £11.99, August 1990, 0 233 98578 6
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D.H. Lawrence: A Literary Life 
by John Worthen.
Macmillan, 196 pp., £27.50, September 1989, 0 333 43352 1
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... affects this phrase: ‘he could no more be aggressive on the score of his Englishness than a rose can be aggressive on the score of his rosiness.’ So reads the American edition. The English edition of 1924 prints ‘its rosiness’, and so does Cambridge. Now, in his introduction Bruce Steele argues that Lawrence had nothing to do with the setting of ...

Agringado

Joan Acocella, 14 December 1995

Flamenco Deep Song 
by Timothy Mitchell.
Yale, 232 pp., £18.95, January 1995, 0 300 06001 7
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¡Tango! The Dance, the Song, the Story 
by Simon Collier, Artemis Cooper, María Susana Azzi and Richard Martin.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £24.95, October 1995, 0 500 01671 2
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Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba 
by Yvonne Daniel.
Open University, 196 pp., £27.50, August 1995, 0 253 31605 7
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... cantantes of Madrid. Accordingly, cante jondo became more ‘civilised’, whereupon the purists rose up, protesting against its civilisation. The battle has continued unabated ever since. A high point was the Twenties, when Iberian intellectuals were gripped by españolismo, the artistic nationalism that accompanied Spain’s late entry into European ...

Dreamtime with Whitlam

Michael Davie, 4 September 1986

The Whitlam Government 1972-1975 
by Gough Whitlam.
Viking, 788 pp., £17.95, July 1986, 0 670 80287 5
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... a contrast between the prosperity of the two countries. The graph of their own standard of living rose steadily. Migrants poured in; officials in Canberra spoke seriously of the possibility of a population of 60 million by the end of the century; pasture improvement, through the use of superphosphates, generously subsidised, seemed a magical way of turning ...

Mr Lukacs changes trains

Edward Timms, 19 February 1987

Georg Lukacs: Selected Correspondence 1902-1920 
translated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar.
Columbia, 318 pp., $25, September 1986, 9780231059688
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... 1905 as one of the instigators of the Hungarian intellectual revival, he had gone on to make his mark in Germany as a cultural theorist in the tradition of Dilthey, Simmel and Weber. When he settled in Heidelberg in 1912, he seemed set for a distinguished university career. His early inquiries had focused on the relationship between spiritual experience and ...

Can you spot the source?

Wendy Doniger, 17 February 2000

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 
by J.K. Rowling.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £10.99, July 1999, 0 7475 4215 5
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... have killed him but for his mother’s self-sacrificial intervention; the scar functions, like the mark of Cain, to set Harry apart. (The evil upper-form boy Malfoy calls him ‘Scarhead’.)The Family Romance haunts the story of the ugly duckling, raised among scornful ducks until he discovers that he’s really a swan. It haunts real-life ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... lesser outbreaks battered London for the next eight years. Whenever deaths from plague in London rose above 30 a week – the number was later raised to 40 – the theatres were ordered shut, with the result (as Leeds Barroll showed in his groundbreaking Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre) that from 1603 to 1610 public playhouses were probably ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While communists ...

By All Possible Art

Tobias Gregory: George Herbert, 18 December 2014

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert 
by John Drury.
Penguin, 396 pp., £9.99, April 2014, 978 0 14 104340 1
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... agree To meet together, where I lay, And all in sport to jeer at me. First, Beauty crept into a rose, Which when I plucked not, Sir, said she, Tell me, I pray, Whose hands are those? But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then Money came, and chinking still, What tune is this, poor man? said he: I heard in Music you had skill. But thou shalt ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... until lately an unperceived element – of a certain native moderation of temper that is likely to mark his presidency. Yet his silence on Gaza has been startling, even immoderate. The ascent of Barack Obama was connected in the world as well as in the US with peculiar and passionate hopes, and his chances of emerging as a leader of the world are diminished ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian ...

Rigging the Death Rate

Paul Taylor, 11 April 2013

... dot; the position of the dot is the best estimate of the mortality rate; the bars through the dot mark the 95 per cent confidence interval: if the data are accurate and the method unbiased, 95 per cent of the time the true rate will be somewhere in this range. Hospital units are arranged in order of the number of operations performed, with smaller units to ...

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