Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography 
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3
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... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...

Real Romans

Michael Kulikowski, 1 August 2024

The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium 
by Anthony Kaldellis.
Oxford, 1133 pp., £34.99, February, 978 0 19 754932 2
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... king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close and fast. R. says, quite ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... contributed to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent ...

Poetry and Christianity

Barbara Everett, 4 February 1982

Three for Water-Music 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 69 pp., £2.95, July 1981, 0 85635 363 9
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The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse 
edited by Donald Davie.
Oxford, 319 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 19 213426 4
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... and negations in Davie’s art are clearly conditions of their opposite, as a love of country may dictate a refusal to be mindlessly ‘patriotic’. In ‘Middlesex’ Davie tells the story of an English girl met serving beers in a Greek bar: The longer loop their Odysseys, the more Warmly exact the Ithakas they remember: Thus, home she said was ...

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

William Davies: Education, Education, Algorithm, 24 February 2022

... text matching internet sources or essays submitted elsewhere – evidence that this student may have used an essay mill or essay bank. A study by the University of Swansea in 2018 found that one in seven students in the UK admitted to using an essay mill. The government has recently pledged to make essay-writing services illegal, but that won’t stop ...

Fritz Lang and the Life of Crime

Michael Wood, 20 April 2017

... uses and meanings, of course, and we might say the more the better. The lives we imagine for crime may help us to see in it and around it, and thinking about crime may help us to think about other matters. Still, we need a way of managing the profusion, and I am going to suggest three major meanings or reference points for ...

A Strange Blight

Meehan Crist: Rachel Carson’s Forebodings, 6 June 2019

‘Silent Spring’ and Other Writings on the Environment 
by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber.
Library of America, 546 pp., £29.99, March 2018, 978 1 59853 560 0
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... of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on the ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicoloured, gorgeously plumed sea worms carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... In the chapter in The Prince on the savage Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, he says that cruelty may be well or ill matched to its end, ‘se del male è licito dire bene’ – if it’s OK to talk ‘well’ of evil. Macaulay thought that the Pistola manuscript, a morbid account in Machiavelli’s hand of the Florentine plague of 1523, could not have been ...

The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

... on paleographic grounds this is assigned to the seventh or eighth century. The cross itself may be older – not as old as St Thomas, as the relics claim to be, but very beautiful and austere. What this unexpected extension of the Thomas story produced in me was not any access of religious feeling but an intense biographical curiosity. His Indian ...

Why Do the Tories Always Have the Luck?

Peter Clarke, 23 February 1995

Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 
edited by Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball.
Oxford, 842 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 19 820238 5
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... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...
The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht 
by John Fuegi.
HarperCollins, 732 pp., £25, July 1994, 0 00 255386 4
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... case. That the reader will unquestioningly believe what he is told, and, if told it enough times, may even carry on on Fuegi’s behalf, telling his friends, ‘That Brecht was a nasty piece of work, and he didn’t even write his own plays,’ assumes a rather naive view of reading. It also doesn’t allow for fairness, the English equivalent of ...

Tocqueville in Saginaw

Alan Ryan, 2 March 1989

Tocqueville: A Biography 
by André Jardin, translated by Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway.
Peter Halban, 550 pp., £18, October 1988, 1 870015 13 4
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... that was obliging men to rebuild the entire structure of society on new foundations.’ They may have shared a feeling that aristocratic privilege imposed a duty to provide sound political leadership, and act as intermediaries between the subject and the state, but they interpreted that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was ...

The World of School

John Bayley, 28 September 1989

The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 523 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 297 79320 9
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Osbert: A Portrait of Osbert Lancaster 
by Richard Boston.
Collins, 256 pp., £17.50, August 1989, 0 00 216324 1
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Ackerley: A Life of J.R. Ackerley 
by Peter Parker.
Constable, 465 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 09 469000 6
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... and although it is no longer so obsessional and so long-lasting as it could once be, it may still determine the individual outlook more than most care to own. The sense of belonging or not belonging, important for Bloomsbury or for the Brideshead Generation written about by Humphrey Carpenter, is less significant than the initial and basic instinct ...

A Slight Dash of the Tiresome

Brian Harrison, 9 November 1989

The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism 
edited by Lawrence Goldman.
Cambridge, 199 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 521 35032 8
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... that we want is discussion, and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be.’ In Liberal vision, the lamp of reason blazes forth to scatter the forces of tradition, obscurantism, convention, violence, deceit, formality, Medieval superstition and unearned privilege. Many of these forces were seen as lurking within the Tory ...