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In Fiery Letters

Mark Ford: F.T. Prince, 8 February 2018

Reading F.T. Prince 
by Will May.
Liverpool, 256 pp., £75, December 2016, 978 1 78138 333 9
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... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...

I was there to inflict death

Christian Lorentzen: Cormac McCarthy’s Powers, 5 January 2023

The Passenger 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 381 pp., £20, October, 978 0 330 45742 2
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Stella Maris 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 190 pp., £20, December, 978 0 330 45744 6
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... menses’, and the nightmare variety act continues until her suicide on Christmas Day 1972, in the woods outside Stella Maris, the Wisconsin psychiatric clinic where she has been a patient for two months. The Kid is vulgar and obnoxious. He calls her ‘Birdtits’, among other insults. He taunts her about her family, her studies in mathematics, her plans to ...

Steal, Burn, Rape, Kill

Alex de Waal: Famine in Tigray, 17 June 2021

... communicable diseases and to read the warning signs of impending distress. In a paper from 1976, John Rivers of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described the shift from severe poverty to famine as like freezing water turning to ice: it’s not just a lower temperature, but a change in state. During the early stages of a food crisis, the ...

Mailer’s Psychopath

Christopher Ricks, 6 March 1980

The Executioner’s Song 
by Norman Mailer.
Hutchinson, 1056 pp., £8.85, November 1979, 0 09 139540 2
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... having to touch hers. Likewise with the different concurrence between Mailer and the psychiatrist Woods, on Gilmore and high risk: ‘Gilmore had been keeping in touch with something indispensable to be in touch with.’ It is a question of Mailer’s being in touch with all these people who are not he, and not of his doling himself out through the ...

Who will stop them?

Owen Hatherley: The Neo-Elite, 23 October 2014

The Establishment and How They Get Away with It 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 335 pp., £16.99, September 2014, 978 1 84614 719 7
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... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...

Things Keep Happening

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Histories of Histories, 20 November 2008

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century 
by John Burrow.
Allen Lane, 553 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 7139 9337 0
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What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe 
by Anthony Grafton.
Cambridge, 319 pp., £13.99, March 2007, 978 0 521 69714 9
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The Theft of History 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £14.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 69105 5
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Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History 
by Darien Shanske.
Cambridge, 268 pp., £54, January 2007, 978 0 521 86411 4
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... A story, as John Burrow says of his own History of Histories, is selective. It looks forward ‘to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its criteria of relevance’. Hence a difficulty: The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...

Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples, a monumental shopping arcade, at least ...

Umbrageousness

Ferdinand Mount: Staffing the Raj, 7 September 2017

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India 
by Shashi Tharoor.
Hurst, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 808 8
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The Making of India: The Untold Story of British Enterprise 
by Kartar Lalvani.
Bloomsbury, 433 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 1 4729 2482 7
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India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire 
by Jon Wilson.
Simon & Schuster, 564 pp., £12.99, August 2017, 978 1 4711 0126 7
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... didn’t even need democracy: fellow-feeling would have been enough. My great-great-grandfather John Low, arguing against Lord Dalhousie’s proposal to annex Nagpur in 1854, recalled from his experience all over India cases of our having suffered heavy losses in revenue, and very extensive losses in human lives, owing to the want of wealth among our native ...

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America 
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9
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... snow of an intensity and duration unprecedented in living memory. ‘Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them,’ Spenser wrote of the poor in Ireland. ‘They looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat the dead ...

The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor

Charles Nicholl: Edward Kelly, 19 April 2001

... last years. The best-known part of Kelley’s story concerns his long partnership with the magus John Dee. It begins with his arrival at Dr Dee’s house, in the Thameside village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a ...

Central Bankism

Edward Luttwak, 14 November 1996

... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...

Memories of Amikejo

Neal Ascherson: Europe, 22 March 2012

... Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens combined, the triangular Discrepancy is covered by pretty green woods in summer, with the small, drab town of Kelmis/La Calamine in one corner. For a century, the inhabitants lived mostly by smuggling booze into the Netherlands, especially after the zinc mine gave out; the little strip contained seventy bars and cafés. In ...

Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, 22 October 1992

... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...

Mothers and Others

Nicholas Spice: Coetzee’s Multistorey Consciousness, 7 March 2024

‘The Pole’ and Other Stories 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 255 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 78730 405 5
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... for them. As lovers they are inept, incapable of communicating human warmth. Their prototype is John Coetzee, the subject of Summertime (2009), the third in Coetzee’s triptych of ‘autobiographical’ novels. Its metafictional conceit is that Coetzee has died and a biographer, writing about him in the 1970s when he was still making his way as a ...

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