Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

“... the man told reporters that it was actually a copy of a Purple Heart.Vietnam Veterans Trump (on John McCain): ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?’ (McCain has since endorsed Trump.)Scientists Trump (tweet): ‘The ...”

The Knock at the Door

Philip Clark: The Complete Mozart, 8 February 2018

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The New Complete Edition 
Universal Classics, £275, October 2016Show More
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“... conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Dutch conductor Frans Brüggen and the British conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood became pioneers of what became known as ‘historically informed practice’, the aim being to liberate the music from the sentimentalised baggage and mannerisms imposed by misreadings and lazy ...”

Miss Dior, Prodigally Applied

Ian Patterson: On Jilly Cooper, 18 May 2017

Mount! 
by Jilly Cooper.
Corgi, 610 pp., £7.99, February 2017, 978 0 552 17028 4
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“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

Hatpin through the Brain

Jonathan Meades: Closing Time for the Firm, 9 June 2022

The Palace Papers 
by Tina Brown.
Century, 571 pp., £20, April, 978 1 5291 2470 5
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“... opera buffa that keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage ...”

For the Love of Uncle Enver

Thomas Meaney: Albania after Hoxha, 23 June 2022

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History 
by Lea Ypi.
Penguin, 313 pp., £9.99, June, 978 0 14 199510 6
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“... classics of liberal philosophy and political theory – from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice – can’t realise their own putative ambitions without reckoning with the latent radicalism in their projects. For several years Ypi has been a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, an ...”

Fraternity

Nicholas Penny, 8 March 1990

The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. IV, Parts I-II: From the American Revolution to World War One 
by Hugh Honour.
Harvard, 379 pp., £34.95, April 1989, 9780939594177
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Primitive Art in Civilised Places 
by Sally Price.
Chicago, 147 pp., £15.95, December 1989, 0 226 68063 0
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The Return of Cultural Treasures 
by Jeanette Greenfield.
Cambridge, 361 pp., £32.50, February 1990, 0 521 33319 9
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“... security of his readers. He added, still more provocatively, that ‘the late great physiologist, John Hunter, used to maintain (and I think he proved it) that the African black was the true original man, and all the others only different varieties derived from him, and more or less debased or improved. If so, what more infallible criterion can there be for ...”

I hear, I see, I learn

Nicholas Spice, 4 November 1993

The Green Knight 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 472 pp., £15.99, September 1993, 0 7011 6030 6
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“... section of the wider pattern which, in the absence of any social ground, holds the cast of 13 major characters together. The pattern discloses itself through movement and may be thought of as a kind of dance. The energy for this dance comes from the plot. In a semi-allegorical narrative like The Green Knight plot is itself emblematic, functioning as an ...”

Total Knowledge

Peter Campbell, 10 September 1992

Hypertext 
by George Landow.
Johns Hopkins, 242 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 8018 4281 6
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“... to understand what experis in other fields are saying. A few weeks earlier, the editor of Nature, John Maddox, reported on a conference about scientific journals and electronic publishing. Now that electronic mail (email) allows instant publication, printed journals carry a time penalty. Moreover, as email contributions and commentary appear side by side they ...”

Modernisms

Frank Kermode, 22 May 1986

Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement 
by C.K. Stead.
Macmillan, 393 pp., £27.50, March 1986, 0 333 37457 6
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The Myth of Modernism and 20th-century Literature 
by Bernard Bergonzi.
Harvester, 216 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7108 1002 4
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The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts 
by Roger Shattuck.
Faber, 362 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 571 12071 7
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“... happens to contain a spelling mistake of his own: the fact that one of his American Modernists is John Ashbery, whose name Stead cannot spell, gives one little confidence in the quality of the information underlying these Modernist choices. Stead is a vigorous writer, and there are pages in this book that are stronger than my review suggests. But it is ...”

The Nazi Miracle

Alan Milward, 23 January 1986

Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant 
edited by Henry Ashby Turner, translated by Ruth Hein.
Yale, 333 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 300 03294 3
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Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ 
by Anna Bramwell.
Kensal Press, 288 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 946041 33 4
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Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe 
by John Gillingham.
Methuen, 183 pp., £15.95, October 1985, 0 416 39570 8
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Geschichte der Deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1945. Vol. II: 1941-1943 
by Dietrich Eichholtz.
Akademie Verlag, 713 pp., January 1986
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“... the Nazis and the world of business was almost total. The really big businessmen, the heads of the major German corporations, moved in high circles – from which, as Henry Ashby Turner showed in his excellent study,* they looked down on the Nazis with shuddering distaste and mounting alarm. For their part, Hitler’s economic advisers regarded the world of ...”

The Road to Sligo

Tom Paulin, 17 May 1984

Poetry and Metamorphosis 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Cambridge, 97 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 521 24848 5
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Translations 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 120 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 19 211958 3
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Conversation with the Prince 
by Tadeusz Rozewicz, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Anvil, 206 pp., £4.95, March 1982, 0 85646 079 6
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Passions and Impressions 
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 396 pp., £16.50, October 1983, 0 571 12054 7
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An Empty Room 
by Leopold Staff, translated by Adam Czerniawski.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £3.25, March 1983, 0 906427 52 5
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“... However, it wasn’t until Dryden’s translation of 1697 that the Aeneid became naturalised as a major English poem. Like Gavin Douglas, Dryden writes out of pride in his nation and his native language, and he aims to create a consolidating, monumental work. In a long, dedicatory preface he states that his expressed confidence in his own translation may ...”

Out of the Gothic

Tom Shippey, 5 February 1987

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction 
by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove.
Gollancz, 511 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 575 03942 6
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Eon 
by Greg Bear.
Gollancz, 504 pp., £10.95, October 1986, 0 575 03861 6
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts 
by Douglas Adams.
Heinemann, 590 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 434 00920 2
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Humpty Dumpty in Oakland 
by Philip K. Dick.
Gollancz, 199 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 575 03875 6
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The Watcher 
by Jane Palmer.
Women’s Press, 177 pp., £2.50, September 1986, 0 7043 4038 0
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I, Vampire 
by Jody Scott.
Women’s Press, 206 pp., £2.50, September 1986, 0 7043 4036 4
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“... Continuum’ savages every ‘Golden Age’ cliché it can find right down to the classic line: ‘John, we’ve forgotten our food pills.’ Try that in the high-fibre age! The list of mid-Eighties new authors is incomparably stronger than that of the mid-Seventies: Benford, Gibson, Crowley, Powers, Shea, Brin, Wolfe, Morrow, Elgin, as opposed to what then ...”

What about the aeroplanes?

Gillian Beer, 23 April 1987

The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 1 1904-1912 
edited by Andrew McNeillie.
Hogarth, 411 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 7012 0666 7
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The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels 
by Lucio Ruotolo.
Stanford, 262 pp., $29.50, November 1986, 0 8047 1342 1
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Virginia Woolf and the Real World 
by Alex Zwerdling.
California, 370 pp., £24.95, October 1986, 0 520 05684 1
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“... Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway as the centres of intensity in the book’s life, the ‘major characters’, and are led to expect connection between them at the level of event. Instead, their contacts are oblique and communal: like other inhabitants of the city, they observe the closed car, the commercial aeroplane. They share no personal ...”

Don’t do what Allende did

Greg Grandin: Allende, 19 July 2012

Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War 
by Tanya Harmer.
North Carolina, 375 pp., £38.95, October 2011, 978 0 8078 3495 4
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“... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...”

Five Possible Ways to Kill a State

Neal Ascherson: Vanished Kingdoms, 15 December 2011

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe 
by Norman Davies.
Allen Lane, 830 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 1 84614 338 0
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“... but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority’. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted ‘the healthy “civic nationalism” of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts’. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the ...”