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Don’t pee in the lift

Stefan Collini: Keeping Up with the Toynbees, 6 June 2024

An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals 
by Polly Toynbee.
Atlantic, 436 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 83895 837 4
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... determined to hang on to their existing conviction about the peculiarity of the British in this matter, despite an accumulation of doubt-inducing counter-evidence. Some see the claim as further proof of the stultifying grip of a long-established class formation on so many areas of national life, while others delight in the easily comprehensible fretwork of ...

Emily v. Mabel

Susan Eilenberg: Emily Dickinson, 30 June 2011

Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Virago, 491 pp., £9.99, April 2011, 978 1 84408 453 1
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Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 535 pp., £25.95, September 2010, 978 0 674 04867 6
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... my Father’s ground to any House or town,’ sounding as if she were a ghost. It was not just a matter of not leaving the property, however. She ran away from guests who came to the door, which caused her brother on at least one occasion to scold her for rudeness, so that she felt ‘quite chagrined and wretched’. Increasingly she hid from friends who ...

Paradigms Gone Wild

Steven Shapin, 30 March 2023

The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science 
edited by Bojana Mladenović.
Chicago, 302 pp., £20, November 2022, 978 0 226 82274 7
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... which rivalled Berkeley for radicalism – the students’ two great intellectual heroes were Herbert Marcuse and himself. The idea of ‘being a guru’, he said, ‘scared the shit out of me’.Campus radicals seized on Kuhn’s book as a brilliantly subversive exposé. Just as they had suspected, science wasn’t the open-minded objective pursuit of ...

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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... Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff Cooper, in 1919. ‘Her’ was Venetia Montagu, the light of Herbert Asquith’s life when he was prime minister, but now sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian millionaire. This ‘deformity’ was Max Aitken, still only forty but already – despite the private objections of George V – sitting in ...

Forget the Dylai Lama

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan, 6 November 2003

Dylan's Visions of Sin 
by Christopher Ricks.
Viking, 517 pp., £25, October 2003, 9780670801336
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... poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this score, especially in relation to what Dylan owes to ...

Black and White Life

Mark Greif: Ralph Ellison, 1 November 2007

Ralph Ellison: A Biography 
by Arnold Rampersad.
Knopf, 657 pp., $35, April 2007, 978 0 375 40827 4
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... writes. Ralph’s mother, Ida, worked as a janitor and maid to raise Ralph and his brother, Herbert. She died in Cincinnati, at 52, possibly from tuberculosis of the hip. Mentored by members of the Oklahoma City black elite who saw promise in the boy, Ralph first escaped his family in 1933, through his early musical talent, travelling to the all-black ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... extreme Islamists’ or ‘Islamic extremist terrorists’), Black Lives Matter and Hillary Clinton. The proceedings opened with a benediction from a pastor asking for God’s help in defeating the ‘enemy’: Clinton and the ‘liberal Democratic Party’. Mothers told sad stories of their deceased children. Two had been murdered in ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... amenable to different kinds of construction.’ What happens in film, Bordwell says, is always a matter of film style, and no amount of cultural theory can compensate for failing to look at what’s on the screen. Film is not only a matter of style, of course; but film style is both concrete and shifting. ‘The way movies ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... and Priestley, and his book is littered with indications that the ‘state of the nation’ is a matter of some concern to him. Following his habit of recovering forgotten precedents, I decided to continue the inquiry with the help of a writer who started using buses to investigate the condition of England seventy years before McKie embarked on his ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... Bank of England was ‘in pole position’ to help the car industry. Mervyn King believes it is a matter for government, not the Bank, to come to the aid of ailing industries, and the Bank immediately began briefing against the notion that it should do more: it is not ‘commercially viable’, they said, objecting to Mandelson’s characterisation of the ...

Qui êtes-vous, Sir Moses?

C.R. Whittaker, 6 March 1986

Ancient History: Evidence and Models 
by M.I. Finley.
Chatto, 131 pp., £12.95, September 1985, 0 7011 3003 2
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... examine the work of Finley against the historiographic backcloth which forms much of the subject-matter of his latest book. In France at least, the reason for these differences is not hard to seek, given the dominance of the Annales school in post-war French historiography. For them, the aim was une histoire à part entière – embracing all human activity ...

Warrior Librarians

Neal Ascherson: Cultural Pillaging, 2 July 2020

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War Two Europe 
by Kathy Peiss.
Oxford, 296 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 19 094461 2
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... to which they were relevant, or at least where they were found. For G-2, books and general reading matter were a mere ‘by-catch’ of the hunt, which meant that they were willing for the IDC to become the main channel for books and periodicals. But the IDC had a further rival, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of G-5, known as ‘the Monuments ...

No Innovations in My Time

Ferdinand Mount: George III, 16 December 2021

George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch 
by Andrew Roberts.
Allen Lane, 763 pp., £35, October, 978 0 241 41333 3
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... full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling us that ‘it would be wrong … to imagine that George III is one of those historical personages who from the very start have been particularly unfortunate in the way they have been ...

Why aren’t they screaming?

Helen Vendler: Philip Larkin, 6 November 2014

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love 
by James Booth.
Bloomsbury, 532 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 1 4088 5166 1
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... the capacity to write poetry dried up and left him desolate. What is changed by Booth is chiefly a matter of emphasis: since the public popular affection for Larkin has favoured a less complex version of the poet, one more invested in pathos and consolation than in subversion, Booth insists on the ironic and ambiguous Larkin while granting the case for the ...

Do you like him?

Ian Jack: Ken Livingstone, 10 May 2012

You Can’t Say That: Memoirs 
by Ken Livingstone.
Faber, 710 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 571 28041 4
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... memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With words Mum never forgot Dad assured her: “It can’t matter just this once, Eth,”’ a line that Muir and Norden themselves might have written (though in the 1950s it could never have been broadcast). But then so much of Livingstone’s account of his early years catches the mood of the Glums. The Glums were ...

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