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Chemical Soup

James Meek: Embalming Lenin’s body, 18 March 1999

Lenin's Embalmers 
by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson.
Harvill, 215 pp., £12.99, October 1998, 1 86046 515 3
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... production and perpetuate ideology, and did not clash with the whims and prejudices of the ruling class. The institute established to care for Lenin’s mummy grew and grew. A mausoleum trio, including Zbarsky, roamed the Soviet sector of postwar Germany with permission to loot whatever they could find to help in their work. Every scientist in the institute ...

Losers

Frank Kermode, 5 September 1985

Family and Friends 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 187 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 224 02337 3
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... a devious Christian history professor with a tragic romantic past. We watch her teaching, taking a class through Adolphe, a work important to her own book on The Romantic Dilemma, and one which enables her to reflect sombrely on such painful sentences as the one beginning: Mais quand on voit l’angoisse qui résulte de ces liens brisés ... Again the frieze ...

Prince Arthur

Paul Addison, 21 August 1980

Balfour 
by Max Egremont.
Collins, 391 pp., £12.95, June 1980, 0 00 216043 9
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... recovery and embark on a second career, this time as an elder statesman. In the First World War Asquith brought him back as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lloyd George made him Foreign Secretary. An elderly and immaculate grandee, he was still to be seen pottering about doing the occasional odd job for Baldwin’s Cabinet in the late 1920s. His career ...

Tea-Leafing

Duncan Campbell, 19 October 1995

The Autobiography of a Thief 
by Bruce Reynolds.
Bantam, 320 pp., £15.99, April 1995, 0 593 03779 0
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... is what he was. He stole other people’s things. ‘The younger element, brought up after the war and influenced by Hollywood’s gangster films, thought that guns were glamorous instead of just dangerous,’ writes Reynolds, himself an evacuee during the war. ‘They made armed robbery fashionable but shut themselves ...

Stepchildren

Elspeth Barker, 9 April 1992

Stepsons 
by Robert Liddell.
Peter Owen, 228 pp., £14.95, February 1992, 0 7206 0853 8
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Farewell Sidonia 
by Erich Hackl.
Cape, 135 pp., £5.99, February 1992, 0 224 02901 0
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... to be friendly but soon lost interest. She was expecting another child, who was to be a dashing war hero and heartbreaker called George. Economies must be practised, with an eye to George’s future. Stephen and Andrew no longer had cake for tea, Elsa lashed herself into furies over spilled jam. Depressing Scotticisms flew from her tongue: ‘Mony a mickle ...

Pound & Co.

August Kleinzahler: Davenport and Kenner, 26 September 2019

Questioning Minds: Vols I-II: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner 
edited by Edward Burns.
Counterpoint, 1817 pp., $95, October 2018, 978 1 61902 181 5
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... insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there wasn’t insane. He was the same brilliant, manipulative, unrepentant fascist and antisemite he had always been and remained until his death, despite occasional public ...

On the Disassembly Line

Katrina Forrester: Dirty Work, 7 July 2022

Work without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism 
by Phil Jones.
Verso, 134 pp., £10.99, October 2021, 978 1 83976 043 3
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Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America 
by Eyal Press.
Head of Zeus, 303 pp., £16.99, January, 978 1 80110 722 8
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... a physical and psychic toll, what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett call ‘the hidden injuries of class’. On the kill floors, most workers are ‘at-will’ employees and can be fired at any time. In 2019, the annual turnover in many Texan slaughterhouses was 100 per cent.The ethnographer Timothy Pachirat describes industrial slaughterhouses – along with ...

Diary

May Jeong: Femicide in Kandahar, 7 September 2017

... any potential abuse of power.’ But the foreign funds that flooded into Afghanistan after the war distorted this relationship, creating an elite class divorced from the rest of the people. That the international community continued to back these strongmen mystified her. Hamidi was reluctant to name names, but I thought ...

A Long Silence

David A. Bell: ‘Englishness’, 14 December 2000

Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 
by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 389 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780198206811
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... to begin a paragraph by paraphrasing some commonly held view of the English: ‘Removing the lower-class Englishman from his own environment evidently had the effect of loosening his moral moorings’; ‘The English were proud of their lack of vindictiveness’; ‘For the English the most savage war seemed a kind of ...

Partners in Crime

Julie Elkner: Everyday life in Stalinist Russia, 8 March 2007

Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia 
by Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Princeton, 332 pp., £15.95, July 2005, 0 691 12245 8
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... of Fitzpatrick’s chief themes is the way individuals edited and presented their lives, and their class identities, both to the authorities and to one another. She uncovers citizens who falsified their credentials in order to conceal their bourgeois past, and con-artists who exploited the opportunities provided by the upheaval and chaos that followed the ...

The Collage Police

Christian Lorentzen: Ali Smith, 8 March 2018

Autumn 
by Ali Smith.
Penguin, 272 pp., £8.99, August 2017, 978 0 241 97331 8
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Winter 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 0 241 20702 4
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... of Boty’s lost painting Scandal ’63. His memories, which stretch back before the Second World War, are the historical elements of Smith’s collage and serve as reminders that times have been worse than they were in 2016, despite the novel’s opening lines: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again.’ The allusions are as plentiful ...

Making doorbells ring

David Trotter: Pushing Buttons, 22 November 2018

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing 
by Rachel Plotnick.
MIT, 424 pp., £30, October 2018, 978 0 262 03823 2
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... to say, belongs mostly to power. Inoculation by push-button has consistently reinforced the class distinction between those who own or manipulate information and those who have little to dispose of other than their energy. Plotnick’s instructive term for the capacity created in this way is ‘digital command’. Pressure applied by a finger, or ...

The Vulgarity of Success

Murray Sayle: Everest and Empire, 7 May 1998

Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond 
by Peter Steele.
Constable, 290 pp., £18.99, March 1998, 0 09 478300 4
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... year was unusually favourable. Climbing without supplementary oxygen (pioneered by First World War bomber pilots) Major Edward Norton of the British Army and a London surgeon, Howard Somervell, got to 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, at which height the atmosphere holds only a third of the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Four days later ...

Love-of-One’s-Life Department

Terry Castle: The lesbian scarcity economy, 21 October 2004

Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks 
by Diana Souhami.
Weidenfeld, 224 pp., £18.99, July 2004, 9780297643869
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... the ‘tribe of second-rate young women’ with whom Barney surrounded herself. The Second World War found them stranded together in the hills above Florence – for the duration – in Brooks’s new home, the Villa Sant’Agnese. It was a disastrous experiment in cohabitation. Both by now were in their sixties. Barney was heartsick over the ...

Women on the Brink

Azadeh Moaveni, 12 May 2022

... on Ukraine has produced the largest and swiftest mass movement of women since the Second World War. More than four million women have been displaced within Ukraine and around the same number have fled the country. Many of those who left, congregating in towns and cities in Poland, or taking buses and trains to other European capitals, went ...

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