Mastering the Art of Understating Your Wealth

Thomas Keymer: The Tonsons, 5 May 2016

The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons 
edited by Stephen Bernard.
Oxford, 386 pp., £95, March 2015, 978 0 19 870085 2
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... of Adultery, Illustrated with Cuts. He also sought out drama, printing several of Aphra Behn’s best-known comedies: The Feign’d Curtizans, Sir Patient Fancy, part two of The Rover. His first big success came when, after borrowing money to buy the copyright in Dryden’s 1679 version of Troilus and Cressida, he started publishing his new work, notably the ...

Up from the Cellar

Nicholas Spice: The Interment of Elisabeth Fritzl, 5 June 2008

Greed 
by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Serpent’s Tail, 340 pp., £7.99, July 2008, 978 1 84668 666 5
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... It would have been better to have left the novel untranslated. Reviewers of Greed have met it at best with polite puzzlement, at worst with disdain. Philip Hensher said it was ‘atrocious’. And he was right – Greed is unreadable. But it is not the same book as Gier. What has also been atrocious has been the failure of anyone reviewing it to go back and ...

Theirs and No One Else’s

Nicholas Spice: Conductors’ Music, 16 March 2023

Tár 
directed by Todd Field.
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Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary 
by Chris Walton.
Rochester, 306 pp., £26.99, February 2021, 978 1 64825 012 5
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In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor 
by Alice Farnham.
Faber, 298 pp., £16.99, January 2023, 978 0 571 37050 4
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... exhilarations of working together with other talented people on complex projects that she writes best. When asked recently what she thought of Tár, Farnham found it in herself to be positive about it. But as a role model for the woman conductor, Lydia Tár is entirely regressive. In one scene, her daughter, Petra, lines up her toys and gives them each a ...

Cutting it short

John Bayley, 3 November 1983

Alexander Pushkin: Complete Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny, translated by Walter Arndt.
Stanford, 545 pp., $38.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1142 9
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The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction 
by Paul Debreczeny.
Stanford, 386 pp., $32.50, May 1983, 0 8047 1143 7
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... him and proceeds to declaim line upon line of magnificent verse, some of Pushkin’s very best. The story up to then has been in prose, but when the improviser suddenly breaks off, having sketched a situation without a dénouement, it has reached its end. The god has departed: the points have been made with Pushkin’s usual inscrutability. His vivid ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... of an English Country House: St Giles House (2018), Kirk had learned that the new earl, the 12th, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, had in 2012 returned with his wife, Dinah, from an expatriate life as a night-club proprietor and DJ in New York and set about restoring the family seat to its former splendour. The Rebirth of an English Country House, written by the new ...

Inspiration, Accident, Genius

Helen Vendler, 16 October 1997

Keats 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 612 pp., £25, October 1997, 9780571172276
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... to Imperial practice.) Back to Endymion. Motion – though drawing on Vincent Newey’s essay in Nicholas Roe’s 1995 collection Keats and History for his quotations about Keats’s ‘unwitting but definite imaginative consumption, and entrepreneurial representation, of the Orient’ – ratifies these absurd remarks (made offensive by the critic’s ...

‘Someone you had to be a bit careful with’

David Sylvester: Gallery Rogues, 30 March 2000

Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser 
by Harriet Vyner.
Faber, 317 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 571 19627 6
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... was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship. Very few dealers have.’ He also had a great flair for presentation. To begin ...

Arts Councillors

Brigid Brophy, 7 October 1982

The State and the Visual Arts 
by Nicholas Pearson.
Open University, 128 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 335 10109 7
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The Politics of the Arts Council 
by Robert Hutchison.
Sinclair Browne, 186 pp., £7.95, June 1982, 0 86300 016 9
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... and trade union circles to what you might call the arts-administrative class. It is echoed both by Nicholas Pearson, who is described in the blurb to his book as ‘Visual Arts Marketing Officer at the Welsh Arts Council’, and by Robert Hutchison, who ‘worked for five years as a Senior Research and Information Officer for the Arts Council’ and who seems ...

Life and Work

Philip Horne, 8 May 1986

Falling apart 
by Nicholas Salaman.
Secker, 190 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 436 44087 3
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Memoirs of Many in One 
by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, April 1986, 0 224 02371 3
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Free Agents 
by Max Apple.
Faber, 197 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13852 7
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... from some perception which makes intolerable to him his probably emblematic task of copying. Nicholas Salaman’s heroine Charlet, ‘falling apart’ in his new novel, has more to do with up-to-the-minute advertising copy than with 19th-century legal scrivening, and is neither a survivor like Wemmick, nor a martyr like Bartleby, but a victim without ...

Bertie and Alys and Ottoline

Alan Ryan, 28 May 1992

The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. Vol. I: The Private Years, 1884-1914 
edited by Nicholas Griffin.
Allen Lane, 553 pp., £25, March 1992, 0 7139 9023 6
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... was more than usually frantic and more than usually apologetic: but it was not entirely untypical. Nicholas Griffin, the editor of this volume, reckons that between forty and fifty thousand of Russell’s letters are held by the Bertrand Russell Archives at MacMaster University; the correspondence with Ottoline Morrell alone runs to about a thousand items on ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... had not previously told his story, that justify Thompson’s subtitle and make the book, at its best, a portrait of the man who is both the centre and the missing middle of the story.In America the young Binghams were looked after by wealthy connections of their parents, the Brady Tuckers, who ‘lived like Astors’ with ‘three major houses’ and ...

Shoot them to be sure

Richard Gott: The Oxford History of the British Empire, 25 April 2002

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. I: The Origins of Empire 
edited by William Roger Louis and Nicholas Canny.
Oxford, 533 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924676 9
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The 18th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 639 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924677 7
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The 19th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Andrew Porter.
Oxford, 774 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924678 5
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. IV: The 20th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Judith Brown.
Oxford, 773 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924679 3
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. V: Historiography 
edited by William Roger Louis and Robin Winks.
Oxford, 731 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924680 7
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... But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been given the meaty chapters in the bulk of the History. The purpose of the Historiography volume is to trace themes that were dealt with ...

Collective Property, Private Control

Laleh Khalili: Defence Tech, 5 June 2025

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West 
by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.
Bodley Head, 295 pp., £25, February, 978 2 84792 852 5
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Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War 
by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.
Scribner, 319 pp., £20, August 2024, 978 1 6680 3138 4
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... autumn), and Alex Karp, Thiel’s classmate at Stanford, now Palantir’s CEO and the author, with Nicholas Zamiska, of The Technological Republic, a critique of Silicon Valley’s unadventurousness that effectively serves as a sales brochure for his firm.Karp prides himself in being a rebel and disruptor and describes himself as a ‘socialist’ (his ...

Deliverance

Daniel Johnson, 20 June 1996

The Dear Purchase: A Theme in German Modernism 
by J.P. Stern.
Cambridge, 445 pp., £40, February 1995, 0 521 43330 4
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... for all Jünger’s intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was incensed. He continued writing, and, in ...

A Tide of Horseshit

David Runciman: Climate Change Impasse, 24 September 2015

Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change 
by Nicholas Stern.
MIT, 406 pp., £19.95, May 2015, 978 0 262 02918 6
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Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 278 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 21098 9
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Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet 
by Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, February 2015, 978 0 691 15947 8
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... starts to look like a book. Writing, instead of being displaced, can be the displacement activity. Nicholas Stern’s new volume on climate change, which updates his report from 2006, indicates that this kind of tangential approach may now be what’s needed to address the threat of a rapidly warming planet; indeed, it may be all we have left.* Stern doesn’t ...