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 ...

Thunder in the Mountains

J. Hoberman: Orson Welles, 6 September 2007

Orson Welles: Hello Americans 
by Simon Callow.
Vintage, 507 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 09 946261 3
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What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career 
by Joseph McBride.
Kentucky, 344 pp., $29.95, October 2006, 0 8131 2410 7
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... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...

What’s at Stake in Venezuela?

Greg Grandin, 7 February 2019

... at an increasingly hostile Asia and dangerous Europe. Finding it impossible to hold out, Hull ‘rose to the occasion magnificently’, an observer wrote, announcing that the United States would henceforth ‘shun and reject’ the ‘so-called right-of-conquest … The New Deal indeed would be an empty boast if it did not mean that.’ Latin American ...

Diary

Tom Johnson: Strange Visitations, 15 August 2024

... his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose through the ranks to become precentor, and spent his dotage working on the cathedral’s medieval manuscripts.In the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost ...

Remembering the Future

Hazel V. Carby, 4 April 2024

... on the picture reads ‘MANIFEST DESTINY ONWARD TO MARS’, denouncing the hubris of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, with their desire to colonise the sky above us, other planets, space itself. Smith’s dislodged landmass is almost awash in coastal flooding: entire states (Texas, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts) and swathes of the ...

Go to Immirica

Dinah Birch: Hate Mail, 21 September 2023

Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters 
by Emily Cockayne.
Oxford, 299 pp., £20, September, 978 0 19 879505 6
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... Libels, a particularly dispiriting demonstration of prejudice at work.* Edith Swan and Rose Gooding were neighbours who quarrelled, a disagreement which began in 1920 and led to a spate of abusive letters, most of them sent to Swan. In 1921, Swan launched a private prosecution for criminal libel against Gooding. Despite the lack of solid ...

Tunnel Visions

Philip Horne, 4 August 1988

The Tunnel 
by Ernesto Sabato, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Cape, 138 pp., £10.95, June 1988, 0 224 02578 3
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Pilgrims Way 
by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Cape, 232 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 0 224 02562 7
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States of Emergency 
by André Brink.
Faber, 248 pp., £9.95, May 1988, 0 571 15118 3
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Moonrise, Moonset 
by Tadeusz Konwicki, translated by Richard Lourie.
Faber, 344 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 571 13609 5
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... the hands of the population of Canterbury, and his readiness to anticipate betrayal by the English rose he becomes attached to, a nurse called Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The ...

Clubs of Quidnuncs

John Mullan, 17 February 2000

The Dunciad in Four Books 
by Alexander Pope, edited by Valerie Rumbold.
Longman, 456 pp., £55, August 1999, 0 582 08924 7
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... Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the opposite of what lives in the work of dunces, and yet Carew’s sense of wonder is to linger on in Pope’s ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... sophisticated seekers after the purely indigenous origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is ...

A Whack of Pies

Matthew Bevis: Dear to Mew, 16 December 2021

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew 
by Julia Copus.
Faber, 464 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 571 31353 2
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Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Julia Copus.
Faber, 176 pp., £14.99, October 2019, 978 0 571 31618 2
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... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...

Foreigners are fiends!

Neal Ascherson: Poland’s Golden Freedom, 12 May 2022

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1733-95: Light and Flame 
by Richard Butterwick.
Yale, 482 pp., £30, November 2020, 978 0 300 25220 0
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... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... cancer that were diagnosed a few years after he quit. One of Beckett’s best discoveries is Dr Richard Stone, whose father, Joe Stone, had been Wilson’s GP since the 1940s – a job that the junior Stone took over for the last 12 years of Wilson’s life. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ ...

More than Machines

Steven Shapin: Man or Machine?, 1 December 2016

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick 
by Jessica Riskin.
Chicago, 544 pp., £30, March 2016, 978 0 226 30292 8
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... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...

Our Cyborg Progeny

Meehan Crist: Gaia will save us. Sort of, 7 January 2021

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 160 pp., £9.99, July 2020, 978 0 14 199079 8
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... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...