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Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave him unexpected responsibility in the form ...

To Monopolise Our Ears

Daniel Cohen: What Spotify Wants, 4 May 2023

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance 
by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud.
Diversion, 295 pp., £15.99, January 2021, 978 1 63576 744 5
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 
by Nick Seaver.
Chicago, 203 pp., £16, November 2022, 978 0 226 82297 6
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... what a given user likes.’But a Spotify user will like different things depending on the time of day, their mood, whether they’re cooking or running or filing their taxes. As Tom, a product manager at Whisper, tells Seaver, ‘One listener is really many listeners.’ Someone might enjoy listening to techno, and jazz, and R&B. But that doesn’t mean they ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... they’re proper mothers: she made a cake every Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... bed, writing or having sex or sleeping: she could sleep, Kraus reports, for as many as 16 hours a day. Why did she sleep so much? Youngsters do of course, but also a lot of the time Acker was ill. Within weeks of her return to New York, she was diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease, a trouble usually caused by a sexually transmitted infection. This being ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... 1990. On a number of occasions Bradbury even has his journalising hero give us the precise day of the month so as to synchronise the story with such public events as the fall of Mrs Thatcher on the 22nd. Doctor Criminale’s extended prelude is a description of the Booker ceremony in the autumn of this same year, at the Guildhall. The big night is ...

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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... wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of the electorate. In reality, Beaverbrook often got public opinion quite ...

In a Spa Town

James Wood: ‘A Hero of Our Time’, 11 February 2010

A Hero of Our Time 
by Mikhail Lermontov, translated by Natasha Randall.
Penguin, 174 pp., £8.99, August 2009, 978 0 14 310563 3
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... from Russia, seems to have had a demonic energy and a changeable temperament: he could spend all day hunting wild boar, yet another time might sit in his room, complaining of the cold and shivering. The year he spent at Maxim Maximych’s fort, near the Terek River, was eventful. A local Tatar prince has a daughter, Bela, whose beauty impresses Pechorin. At ...

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

... Trump era, has successfully promoted the appointment of many ultra-conservative judges, including Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, for whom they co-ordinated a $10 million campaign. Because of certain information not known to the public, it was widely assumed that Whelan and CRC were collaborating with Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans and possibly ...

The Ticking Fear

John Kerrigan: Louis MacNeice, 7 February 2008

Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems 
edited by Peter McDonald.
Faber, 836 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 571 21574 4
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 571 23381 6
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I Crossed the Minch 
by Louis MacNeice.
Polygon, 253 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 1 84697 014 6
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The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography 
by Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds.
Faber, 288 pp., £9.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23942 9
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... skull’. Reading Greats at Oxford had taught him more enjoyable, pagan reasons for seizing the day. But the reassuring idea that the cosmos was a Heraclitean flux was compromised by the philosophical idealism still current at Merton (the college where, a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone ...

We Are Many

Tom Crewe: In the Corbyn Camp, 11 August 2016

... Corbyn project, the organisation has not had a good press. Momentum has been painted as a modern-day Militant Tendency, its members as ‘hard left’ entryists intent on deselecting MPs who offer any resistance. When I turned up early for a Momentum meeting in Hackney one evening (Owen Smith had emerged as the ‘unity’ candidate to challenge for the ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
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The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
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The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
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... rank in their own profession – from whom they were not always so easily distinguishable in their day. Sutherland’s passion for justice and feeling for the underdog fuel his efforts: ‘below this corps d’élite there is a quantity of first-rate and consistently worthwhile achievement which has been let go into oblivion; wrongly so, I would ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... answered in the enthusiastic endorsements of, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, the reporter Neil Sheehan and the historian Sean Wilentz). The antagonist he explicitly argues with most often is his fellow philo-American of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony Blair), whose own celebratory history of ...

Coalition Phobia

Brian Harrison, 4 June 1987

Labour People, Leaders and Lieutenants: Hardie to Kinnock 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Oxford, 370 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 0 19 822929 1
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J. Ramsay MacDonald 
by Austen Morgan.
Manchester, 276 pp., £19.50, June 1987, 0 7190 2168 5
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Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical 
by Patricia Romero.
Yale, 334 pp., £17.50, March 1987, 0 300 03691 4
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Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst 
by Barbara Castle.
Penguin, 159 pp., £3.95, May 1987, 0 14 008761 3
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... There are few historians who could now operate with such ease all the way from Keir Hardie to Neil Kinnock. Morgan combines historical knowledge with a lively interest in current politics; he shows no coy academic inhibition about linking up the two, for he knows how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... garden in the shade. And while the old white rockers are well represented here (Bob Dylan 27, Neil Young 6, Bruce Springsteen 7), there is nothing from Rihanna, and only one line from Jay-Z (‘I’m not afraid of dying/I’m afraid of not trying’). Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin get one quotation each, which shows way too little R-E-S-P-E-C-T ...

Keep him as a curiosity

Steven Shapin: Botanic Macaroni, 13 August 2020

The Multifarious Mr Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World 
by Toby Musgrave.
Yale, 386 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 0 300 22383 5
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... John Gascoigne situated Banks in the context of the English Enlightenment and the empire; Neil Chambers in 2007 contextualised Banks in the history of collecting; Patricia Fara has a rollicking go at Banks as an exploitative imperialist in Sex, Botany and Empire (2003); Banks gets a chapter to himself in Richard Holmes’s much praised The Age of ...

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