Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... leaves a conscientious biographer in a bit of a pickle. What to do with a subject – especially a major historical subject – who seems to lack a grown-up interior life? Who offers little but stagey poses, a hand languidly flung to brow, or a lot of specious business with a handkerchief? A century on, it’s as if Bernhardt were still daring us to make sense ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... Bellow was bigger game. With Bellow, Atlas was climbing up to the high diving board, essaying a major artist – one still foxily alert and alive, whose reputation had just enjoyed a late-stage booster shot with the publication of Ravelstein – and sunning in his hero’s reflected glory. Atlas and Bellow had much in common: Chicago, Jewishness, an ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... tank in his name. Menachem Begin’s election in 1977, which brought Likud to power and heralded a major realignment in Israeli politics in the right’s favour, should have improved his prospects. But Begin, the former commander of the Irgun militia and a Jabotinsky follower, considered Bibi’s father ‘a pompous windbag who had preferred a comfortable life ...

The Bayswater Grocer

Thomas Meaney: The Singapore Formula, 18 March 2021

Singapore: A Modern History 
by Michael Barr.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £17.99, December 2020, 978 1 350 18566 1
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... that the natural harbour at the mouth of the Johor River had two centuries earlier served as a major port for the sultanate of Johor (and before that as trading post for the Java-based Majapahit empire). Singapore, the port on the Johor River, was not his first choice for an experiment in enlightened colonial rule – he would have preferred to inherit ...

Climbing the Ziggurat

Tom Stevenson: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance, 22 January 2026

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping 
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China 
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World 
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
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... with the prevailing winds when it came to Mao. This put him in a tight spot during the first major purge of the People’s Republic era, which targeted Xi’s old mentor from the north-west, Gao Gang. In 1953, Gao was purged, in part as a result of Deng and Zhou’s machinations. After his subsequent suicide, Mao became convinced that Gao had been a ...

Signs of spring

Anthony Grafton, 10 June 1993

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent 
by Charles Dempsey.
Princeton, 173 pp., £35, December 1992, 0 691 03207 6
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... of the high philology of the humanists as a record of the high art of Renaissance social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: On E.P. Thompson, 21 October 1993

... and urban scene of the Eighties, whose humour can make one wince, and the energy and wit of the major plot development that follows. Its climax, before the earth is extinguished, is the idyll in which reason becomes sexually incarnate, as the heroine lakes the star-captive into her arms – in the eden of a park ‘landscaped in the 1740s’, and ‘made ...

At the Skunk Works

R.W. Johnson, 23 February 1995

Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil 
by Christopher Harvie.
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 241 13352 1
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... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...

Having it both ways

Peter Clarke, 27 January 1994

A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp., £18.99, January 1994, 1 85619 210 5
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A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates 
by Robert Cole.
Macmillan, 285 pp., £40, November 1993, 0 333 59273 5
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From Napoleon to the Second International: International Essays on the 19th Century 
by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Chris Wrigley.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 241 13444 7
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... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...

Singing the Blues

Noël Annan, 22 April 1993

A History of Cambridge University. Vol. IV: 1870-1990 
by Christopher Brooke.
Cambridge, 652 pp., £50, December 1992, 9780521343503
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... different requirements for entry, and boys and girls spent their days travelling for interviews. John Morrison, the tutor of Trinity, tried to get the colleges to agree to a uniform procedure, but Armitage of Queen’s and Pratt of Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was ...

Defoe or the Devil

Pat Rogers, 2 March 1989

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Yale, 210 pp., £20, February 1988, 0 300 04119 5
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The ‘Tatler’: Vols I-III 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 590 pp., £60, July 1987, 0 19 818614 2
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The ‘Spectator’: Vols I-V 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 512 pp., £55, October 1987, 9780198186106
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... identical versions of a pamphlet published in 1715. The grounds for allocating these items to John Oldmixon took many pages to set out, and include both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite ...

In the Chair

Edward Said, 17 July 1997

Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and the Tragedy of Genius 
by Peter Ostwald.
Norton, 368 pp., $29.95, May 1997, 0 393 04077 1
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When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music 
by Norman Lebrecht.
Simon and Schuster, 400 pp., £7.99, July 1997, 0 671 01025 5
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... that a fair number of Gould’s contemporaries-Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Grafman, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, to mention a few of the most gifted – succumbed to mysterious illnesses and had to curtail appearances and whole careers. The extremity of being out there alone, day after day, sooner or later catches up with one, especially if, as in Gould’s ...

Thinking

Peter Campbell, 4 August 1988

Who got Einstein’s office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study 
by Ed Regis.
Simon and Schuster, 316 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 671 69923 7
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Chaos 
by James Gleick.
Heinemann, 354 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 9780434295548
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The School of Genius 
by Anthony Storr.
Deutsch, 216 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 0 233 98010 5
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... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...

Elegant Extracts

Leah Price: Anthologies, 3 February 2000

The Oxford Book of English Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 690 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 214182 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2974 pp., £22.50, December 1999, 0 393 97487 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2963 pp., £22.50, February 2000, 9780393974911
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2963 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01173 2
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2982 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01174 0
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Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature 
edited by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9153 4
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News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 189 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 571 20060 5
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Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Anvil, 157 pp., £7.95, November 1999, 0 85646 313 2
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Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Penguin, 640 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780140588996
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... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...

Nazi Votes

David Blackbourn, 1 November 1984

The Nazi Machtergreifung 
edited by Peter Stachura.
Allen and Unwin, 191 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 04 943026 2
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Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis 1929-35 
by Conan Fischer.
Allen and Unwin, 239 pp., £20, June 1983, 0 04 943028 9
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The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945 
by Michael Kater.
Blackwell, 415 pp., £22.50, August 1983, 0 631 13313 5
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Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933 
by Eve Rosenhaft.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £24, August 1983, 9780521236386
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... that the SA was generally more successful than the Nazi Party in recruiting workers, especially in major urban areas. There we find a significant level of switchovers between Brownshirts and Communists through the depression years. In 1933 the SA would have included both those who had joined out of a vaguely articulated working-class bitterness, and ...