Blink, Bid, Buy

Donald MacKenzie, 12 May 2022

... each slot goes on behind the scenes to determine which ad you will be shown. Your phone or laptop may itself be gathering bids for the auction. Sometimes, an enigmatic pattern or grey rectangle will appear instead of an ad.What goes on during those few seconds is vital to the economics of journalism and is the subject of sharp, subterranean conflict among ...

A Bit Like Gulliver

Stephanie Burt: Seamus Heaney’s Seamus Heaney, 11 June 2009

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney 
by Dennis O’Driscoll.
Faber, 524 pp., £22.50, November 2008, 978 0 571 24252 8
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The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney 
edited by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £45, December 2008, 978 0 521 54755 0
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... even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life. How to supplement – or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a ...

Experiments with Truth

Robert Taubman, 7 May 1981

Midnight’s Children 
by Salman Rushdie.
Cape, 446 pp., £6.95, April 1981, 9780224018234
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... And, metaphor apart, a domino-effect is at work in the narrative. ‘If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper!’ says an old servant, dismissed for theft. Years later he returns for forgiveness, stricken with leprosy (all curses and prophecies come true in this book): mistaken for the ghost of another character, he provokes frightened ...

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov: Surveillance Technology, 5 April 2012

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance 
by Kelly Gates.
NYU Press, 261 pp., £15.99, March 2011, 978 0 8147 3210 6
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... face was presumably missing, they must be rather proud of their technology. The Navy Seals may have been using gear similar to the Robocop-style glasses the Brazilian police have developed in preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Fitted with a small camera that sees as far as 12 miles, the glasses can capture 400 images a second and compare them with a ...

Tempestuous Seasons

Adam Tooze: Keynes in China, 13 September 2018

In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution 
by Geoff Mann.
Verso, 432 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78478 599 4
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... If we don’t do this​ , we may not have an economy on Monday,’ the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said on 18 September 2008 when he demanded action from Congress to assist the banking system. Ten years later we do still have an economy. But it is worth asking whether the panic back then foreclosed other ways forward ...

Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... Sometimes​ you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of England. It’s set in an unnamed village, ‘fewer than fifty redbrick cottages’, within commuting distance of London, a place that is ‘a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of church and pub in the middle ...

The Fog of History

Fredric Jameson: On Olga Tokarczuk, 24 March 2022

The Books of Jacob 
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.
Fitzcarraldo, 892 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 910695 59 3
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... the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez; and it may be said to rival even New Athens itself, of which the equally historical poet Elżbieta Drużbacka says: ‘This volume is so strangely magical that an endless reading is permitted in which one picks and pecks here and there, always finding interesting ...

Thee, Thou, Twixt

Mark Ford: Walter de la Mare, 24 March 2022

Reading Walter de la Mare 
edited by William Wootten.
Faber, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 0 571 34713 1
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... the encircling seas;And calls to causes else forlorn,      The children at your knees:May their brave hearts in days to come      Dream unashamed of these!While this is not exactly a call to take up the white man’s burden, the adjective ‘unashamed’ does push back firmly against incipient imperial guilt and the rhetoric of ...

Protests with Parasols

Michael Wood: Proust, Dreyfus, Israel, 20 December 2012

Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East 
by Jacqueline Rose.
Chicago, 239 pp., £22.50, February 2012, 978 0 226 72578 9
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... of the older century to the anti-Jewish laws of the next seems pretty straight and we may remember that Madeleine Lévy, the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, died in Auschwitz. Pétain himself, we learn in Proust among the Nations, personally intervened to make the provisions of the Statut des Juifs harsher. Rose also tells us that as late as ...

Shovelling Clouds

Adam Mars-Jones: Fred Vargas, 23 April 2015

Temps glaciaires 
by Fred Vargas.
Flammarion, 490 pp., €19.90, March 2015, 978 2 08 136044 0
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... it follows that the reasons for killing someone aren’t fixed for all time. Sexual secrets may lose their explosive force, and even jealousy may weaken as a motive for snuffing out a life. Detective fiction tends to be regarded as naturally right-wing, which may partly be a result ...

I have no books to consult

Stephen Sedley: Lord Mansfield, 22 January 2015

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason 
by Norman Poser.
McGill-Queen’s, 532 pp., £24.99, September 2013, 978 0 7735 4183 2
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... reason himself into an atheist.’ (That the latter process was by no means incomprehensible may be too modern an idea; it is unlikely that Mansfield was advancing a coded defence of Jacobitism.) But although the bare accusation was capable, particularly after the ’45 and Culloden, of destroying a career, in Mansfield’s youth, Poser points out, both ...

Who gets the dacha?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Marshal Zhukov, 24 January 2013

Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov 
by Geoffrey Roberts.
Icon, 375 pp., £25, August 2012, 978 1 84831 442 9
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... drive on the Belorussian Front in 1944; taking Berlin and accepting the German surrender in May 1945. Zhukov was the man on the white horse who led the victory parade in Red Square. Such a popular and charismatic figure was not going to get by without having problems. Both in Stalin’s time and in Khrushchev’s, there were periods of demotion and ...

Blackberry Apocalypse

Nicholas Guyatt: Evangelical Disarray, 15 November 2007

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America 
by Chris Hedges.
Cape, 254 pp., £12.99, February 2007, 978 0 224 07820 7
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... should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.) Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty ...

The Rise and Fall of the Baggy-Trousered Barbarians

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Soviet historiography, 19 August 2004

Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger 
by Richard Pipes.
Yale, 264 pp., £19.95, January 2004, 0 300 10165 1
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Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present 
edited by Samuel Baron and Cathy Frierson.
Sharpe, 272 pp., £18.50, June 2003, 9780765611970
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... regard were diametrically opposite. Still, he got there first by some thirty years. And things may be different at Harvard. Those who know Pipes only as a hardliner during the Cold War heyday of the Reagan years may doubt his credentials as an iconoclast. But what else is one to call someone who invokes Lytton Strachey ...

Bonfire in Merrie England

Richard Wilson: Shakespeare’s Burning, 4 May 2017

... propose a man’s health on his 359th [it was actually the 361st] birthday,’ Shaw said, ‘you may be sure that … what his health requires is country air … But Stratford wants a new theatre. The Memorial is an admirable building, adapted for every conceivable purpose – except that of a theatre.’ Shaw’s fellow governors felt it necessary to make ...