Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... Gray, he also notes that Russell was opposed to evictions on this scale, but that members of his cabinet, who had interests in Ireland, prevented legislation offering tenants greater rights. No one doubted that an eviction order was close to a death sentence, especially in the second half of the 1840s. In Kilrush, Co. Clare, in 18 months between 1847 and ...

Crisis in Brazil

Perry Anderson, 21 April 2016

... on what support could the PT count? The trade unions, if somewhat more active under Dilma, were a shadow of their combative past. The poor remained passive beneficiaries of PT rule, which had never educated or organised them, let alone mobilised them as a collective force. Social movements – of the landless, or the homeless – had been kept at a ...

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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... old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite facts and obscure references, to coax a shadow universe into pure existence. It was obviously written by someone who had read Borges. By 1971, however, Borges was clearly not himself. In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote: I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... European Act of 1987, it was rarely exercised, consensus typically being reached ‘not in the shadow of the veto, but in the shadow of the vote’. Should a member state resist a majority decision, it cannot be enforced, short of foreign occupation, but pressure can be put on it to conform by ‘other means’. The ...

You’re with your king

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Secret Prisons, 10 February 2022

Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison 
by Aziz BineBine, translated by Lulu Norman.
Haus, £9.99, March 2021, 978 1 913368 13 5
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... As time went on, this expansionist ideology began to lose its appeal. Even so it cast a long shadow over the Sahrawis’ aspirations and the fate of any Moroccan activist, like Serfaty, who spoke up in their favour. He was one of a very small minority: more than half a century later, the Palestinian cause can bring thousands of Moroccans out on the ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... I think I had an earlier glimpse of Margaret, an equivocal figure, moving around in the shadow of Eliza, part hardy working-class, part subtle and precarious, as the young Julie Andrews must have seemed in the part. I couldn’t have said any of it this way at the time, and the class fable – or is it a fable about essential human ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there were five rooms. A large bow-windowed bedroom at the front with a huge feather-bed belonged ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... of his most celebrated creation, Widmerpool, on the colonel who hired and fired him in the wartime Cabinet Office, Denis Capel-Dunn, an ‘undistinguished’ lawyer in civil life who perished on a flight back from the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco, to no great distress on Powell’s part. With the completion of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... I see a penumbra of California Syrup of Figs across the cheeks in Giotto, or wherever the shadow of Byzantium falls across Italian painting. My father’s work, as I can now see in retrospect, changed to a considerable degree over the years of my childhood, and this certainly influenced the background against which I grew up. When I was very young, or ...