Done Deal

Christopher Hitchens: Nixon in China, 5 April 2001

A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China 
by Patrick Tyler.
PublicAffairs, 512 pp., £11.99, September 2000, 1 58648 005 7
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... extent of the cultural impression made by the Sino-American encounter. If this relationship never rose to the level of the Anglo-Indian kinship it was because it went on for less time, was based even more on trade and conversion, and was initiated at almost precisely the moment when the Chinese people had made up their minds to be rid of foreign rule. Since ...

Two Pins and a Lollipop

Bee Wilson: Judy Garland’s Greatness, 25 December 2025

Judy Garland: The Voice of MGM 
by Scott Brogan.
Rowman & Littlefield, 404 pp., £50, August, 978 1 4930 8654 2
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... nearly died, and that the film was transformed by George Cukor, who came on set for a week after Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired and before Victor Fleming took over. Cukor changed the bricks of the Yellow Brick Road from oval to rectangular and gave the Wicked Witch a bun to make her look scarier. He transformed Dorothy from blonde to ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: With the KLA, 4 February 1999

... the tradition by issuing one counterfeit version after another of events in Kosovo. Since Richard Holbrooke, Washington’s Balkan fixer, brokered a rickety ceasefire last October, Milutinovic’s arguments have come with a plausible lustre – he invokes the UN Charter, the sovereignty of member states and so on – but his latest observation, that ...

Extraordinary People

Anthony Powell, 4 June 1981

The Lyttelton – Hart-Davis Letters 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 185 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 7195 3770 3
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... Rawlins, (runner-up for the headmastership when Lyttelton’s Uncle Edward was appointed in 1905), rose at once from his stall. Above the echoing crepitations and showers of sparks exploding between the rows of boys, facing each other from their respectively decani and cantoris knifeboards, he pronounced anathema: ‘The boy who has done this thing has ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion ...

Law v. Order

Neal Ascherson: Putin’s strategy, 20 May 2004

Inside Putin's Russia 
by Andrew Jack.
Granta, 350 pp., £20, February 2004, 1 86207 640 5
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Putin's Progress 
by Peter Truscott.
Simon and Schuster, 370 pp., £17.99, March 2004, 0 7432 4005 7
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Putin, Russia's Choice 
by Richard Sakwa.
Taylor and Francis, 307 pp., £15.99, February 2004, 0 415 29664 1
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... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... so reveals that our sense of ourselves as simply a woman or a man is, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams’. The trans person is the chimera we all desire and dread.It is no surprise, then, that the increasing visibility of trans life has led to the reassertion of sex as ...

Authors and Climbers

Anthony Grafton, 5 October 1995

Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 
by Anne Goldgar.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 300 05359 2
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... ordinary. A fellow Huguenot, wearing a blond wig, a black suit with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read ...

Body History

Roy Porter, 31 August 1989

The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture 
by Dorinda Outram.
Yale, 197 pp., £22, May 1989, 0 300 04436 4
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Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories 
by Barbara Gates.
Princeton, 190 pp., £19.95, September 1988, 0 691 09437 3
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Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the 18th and 20th Centuries 
by Ludmilla Jordanova.
Harvester, 224 pp., £19.95, April 1989, 9780745003320
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Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen 
by Jeanne Peterson.
Indiana, 241 pp., $39.95, May 1989, 0 253 20509 3
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... provocative tract for the times, a way of back-projecting the modern dilemma – so well stated by Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man – of how to create a ‘public space defined by the public dignity of embodied individuals’. To rescue our past, we must resurrect the body, all too long hidden from history; and this must be done, not least ...

God in the Body

Anne Hollander, 25 January 1996

Cahiers: Le Sentiment 
by Nijinsky, translated into French by Christian Dumais-Lvorski and Galina Pogojeva.
Actes Sud, 300 pp., frs 140, January 1995, 2 7427 0314 4
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... added to it, to blend the scribbling madman with the rutting faun and the soaring spectre of the rose. So far as we know there were no films made of Nijinsky dancing, and we have to rely on descriptions, posed photographs, some snapshots, drawings and sketches, and the legend. But the legend itself, now that Romola and the others with the living memory are ...

Her Body or the Sea

Ian Patterson: Ann Quin, 21 June 2018

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments 
by Ann Quin.
And Other Stories, 192 pp., £10, January 2018, 978 1 911508 14 4
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... Joyce, say, through Henry Green and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs and Christine Brooke-Rose. The dust jacket flaps of novels published by Calder and Boyars between 1966 and 1972 list their books under the varying heads of ‘Contemporary Fiction’, ‘Fiction’, ‘Modern Fiction’; unusually, on the jacket flap of Quin’s Tripticks (1972) the ...

Lunacies

Ian Campbell Ross: ‘provincial genius’, 23 October 2003

Hermsprong; or Man as He Is Not 
by Robert Bage, edited by Pamela Perkins.
Broadview, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2002, 1 55111 279 5
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... fields Rise and enlarge their suburbs. In Bage’s lifetime, the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is ...

Already a Member

R.W. Johnson: Clement Attlee, 11 September 2014

Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister 
by Michael Jago.
Biteback, 390 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 84954 683 6
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... war he kept getting sick or wounded on the eve of great battles that decimated his regiment, and rose to the Labour leadership because most of the obvious contenders had lost their seats in the National Government landslide of 1931. Apart from sheer luck, what changed matters was his ascension to the rank of major in the war and the postwar Labour tide that ...

Into Your Enemy’s Stomach

Alexander Murray: Louis IX, 8 April 2010

Saint Louis 
by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad.
Notre Dame, 947 pp., £61.95, February 2009, 978 0 268 03381 1
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... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...

Scrivener’s Palsy

Carl Elliott: Take the red pill, 8 January 2004

Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire 
by Yolande Lucire.
New South Wales, 216 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 9780868407784
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Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’ 
by Daniel Moerman.
Cambridge, 172 pp., £14.95, October 2002, 0 521 00087 4
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... Miltown was no better than a placebo. A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard Gracely and his colleagues in 1985. Gracely purported to be studying a pain reliever called fentanyl in patients recovering after having their wisdom teeth removed. But he was more interested in whether a clinician’s attitude relieved pain. So he ...