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Marshy Margins

Frank Kermode, 1 August 1996

The True Story of the Novel 
by Margaret Anne Doody.
Rutgers, 580 pp., $44.95, May 1996, 0 8135 2168 8
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... it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length.’ Her view of the matter is similar to that of Pierre-Daniel Huet, a 17th-century French critic she greatly admires; he thought the novel came from Spain, after the Arabs had taught the Spanish ‘the art of novelising’. The rest of Europe learnt it from the Spaniards. ‘It is wonderfully refreshing to ...

When to Stop Counting

Brian Rotman, 27 November 1997

Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem 
by Amir Aczel.
Viking, 147 pp., £9.99, May 1997, 0 670 87638 0
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... asks for a method that would generate the triples of integers satisfying Pythagoras’ equation. Pierre de Fermat, a professional jurist, passionate part-time mathematician and author of many splendid number theorems, thought about the obvious extension of Diophantus’ question: could a cube, for example, 27 (= 33) or 1000 (= 103), be split into a sum of ...

Careful Readers

J.L. Heilbron: A Copernican monomaniac, 22 September 2005

The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus 
by Owen Gingerich.
Arrow, 320 pp., £7.99, July 2005, 0 09 947644 4
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... to Copernicus’s position at the Cathedral of Frauenburg) or a profound epistemologist (as did Pierre Duhem, a 19th-century physicist, philosopher, historian and Catholic apologist, who praised Copernicus’s grasp of the instrumental character of scientific theories). Both were wrong. The preface to De revolutionibus was written not by Copernicus but by ...

‘It didn’t need to be done’

Tariq Ali: The Muslim Response, 5 February 2015

... the great moments of unanimity have taken place at public funerals – like those of Victor Hugo, Pierre Overney, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Edith Piaf. Sunday’s demonstration is of the same order, the crowd is moved by sentiment and satisfied by coming together to express a vague desire for unity and reconciliation. As if the strength of the crowd was enough to ...

After the White Cube

Hal Foster, 19 March 2015

... definitive about it: well-regarded artists who have emerged over the last twenty years, such as Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tino Sehgal among many others, don’t require such space, and in many ways refuse it. (Bigness has also led to bad by-products like immense atria, which, however important they are to museums as event spaces, are deadly as ...

Notes for ‘Anatole’s Tomb’

Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Patrick McGuinness: A Translation by Patrick McGuinness, 14 November 2002

... did not appear during Mallarmé’s lifetime, and when they were first published in 1961 by Jean-Pierre Richard, under the title Pour un Tombeau d’Anatole, they revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarmé, one which even now disturbs the idea of him as the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. My translation here is based on Bertrand Marchal’s ...

Speech Melodies

Paul Mitchinson: Leoš Janáček, 4 December 2008

Janáček: Years of a Life, Volume I 
by John Tyrrell.
Faber, 971 pp., £60, November 2006, 0 571 17538 4
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Janáček: Years of a Life, Volume II 
by John Tyrrell.
Faber, 1074 pp., £60, November 2007, 978 0 571 23667 1
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... Pierre Boulez took his final bow in the opera pit last summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the production was the music chosen: Leoš Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead, written in 1928, the final year of his life. Boulez seemed a little ambivalent about the choice ...

At the Driehaus Museum

Rosemary Hill: Tulips, Fritillaries and Auriculas, 10 July 2025

... tour (until 17 August). McEwen was respectful of the tradition of flower painting epitomised by Pierre-Joseph Redouté, on whom he wrote an undergraduate thesis, but the exhibition’s suggestion that McEwen was ‘the Redouté of our time’ is somewhat misleading. His work is not only less concerned with conventional ideas of beauty, it lacks any obvious ...

The European (Re)discovery of the Shamans

Carlo Ginzburg, 28 January 1993

... happy to drink of this smoke.’ We read in an account prepared half a century later by the Jesuit Pierre Biard that the Canadian savages ‘also used petun and they drank the smoke.’ That tobacco was used by the native North Americans on occasions of a ritual nature did not escape many European observers. It is again ...

Desire Was Everywhere

Adam Shatz, 16 December 2010

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives 
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.
Columbia, 651 pp., £26, August 2010, 978 0 231 14560 2
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... into the night. Guattari was manic. ‘He needed something like Ritalin,’ his colleague Jean-Pierre Muyard recalled. ‘We had to find a way to calm him down.’ It was Muyard, who had studied philosophy with Deleuze at the University of Lyon, who arranged the first meeting between the two men. Guattari had drawn on Deleuze’s critique of structuralism ...

Self-Illuminated

Gilberto Perez: Godard’s Method, 1 April 2004

Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 
by Colin MacCabe.
Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £25, November 2003, 0 7475 6318 7
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... just two members – Godard and a young man ‘better than me in thinking and philosophy’, Jean-Pierre Gorin – and broke up in 1973. Godard’s relationship with Anne-Marie Miéville began during his convalescence from a 1971 motorcycle accident in which he was badly injured, and their collaboration has been the longest lasting of his career. They put ...

Diary

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

... from his aunt and bullies the timid Joseph, who is studying for his medical exams. He goes to see Pierre Schoof, breaks the shop rules by loudly talking German, and when hustled into a back office, asks to borrow money: a large part of his father’s fortune, he reveals, is tied up in Belgium, and he needs to wire 5000 francs immediately in order to release ...

Beyond Borders

Adam Shatz: Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries, 16 February 2023

... to be ignored by those in need of papers. The first request came from a former Resistance comrade, Pierre Mouchenik, alias Pierrot, who requested papers for Jewish Displaced Persons seeking to go to Palestine. Kaminsky declined at first; he did not want to become involved in illegal activities. But when Pierrot took him to Germany in January 1946 to see one of ...

Our Way of Proceeding

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jesuit Methods, 22 February 2024

The Jesuits: A History 
by Markus Friedrich, translated by John Noël Dillon.
Princeton, 854 pp., £22, October 2023, 978 0 691 22620 0
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... of the Protestant beast, they had initially followed the opinion of Loyola’s close colleague Pierre Favre that dealing with Protestants should be a matter of Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the other’. By 1550 the ...

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