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On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... Ellison responded that he was giving his life to the novel. The burden he was bearing was the weight of an unfinished masterpiece, not the guilt of failing to produce political manifestos. But it turned out not to be so easy to separate the literary from the political vision. Between the politics he renounced and the fiction whose single triumph he could ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... his publisher after delivering the manuscript, ‘to give the hotel-allegory side of it any more weight. It seems to me that a very little allegory goes a long way.’) And the emphasis on transience is as much absurdist or existentialist as political. ‘People are insubstantial,’ an elderly doctor mutters continually; ‘they never last.’ At one point ...

Royal Bodies

Hilary Mantel, 21 February 2013

... loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.Antoinette as a royal consort was a ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... on a pair of scales, and, taking out a gold pencil from his dressing-gown pocket, wrote down his weight in fine German numerals, on a pad which was attached to a metal ashtray. Three years earlier my brother had been born in the same nursing home. He had been breast-fed for a little while. In my case my mother decided not to make the attempt. My birth was in ...

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven underground by the shocking ...

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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... work. At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day. Always prone to losing weight, she reassured Aurelia by listing everything she ate (‘Two bowls of noodle soup, one slice of bread, two helpings of potatoes and cabbage’), updated her on her activities (‘How I love metal work!’), sent poems she’d written for the camp newspaper ...

Death by erosion

Paul Seabright, 11 July 1991

Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How patients, families and physicians can cope with uncertainty 
by Harold Bursztajn, Richard Feinbloom, Robert Hamm and Archie Brodsky.
Routledge, 456 pp., £12.99, February 1991, 0 415 90292 4
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Examining doctors: Medicine in the 1900s 
by Donald Gould.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, June 1991, 0 571 14360 1
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Some Lives! A GP’s East End 
by David Widgery.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 248 pp., £15.95, July 1991, 1 85619 073 0
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... onto treatment whether the patient needs it or not, and people may die under the impressive weight of medical science even while everyone’s conscience remains absolutely clear. Professional codes of this kind come into existence, the authors suggest, because of an insecurity we all feel about coping with uncertainty. Much of ethics (like much of the ...

Larceny

Adam Mars-Jones, 24 March 1994

The Fermata 
by Nicholson Baker.
Chatto, 305 pp., £14.99, January 1994, 0 7011 5999 5
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... particularly likeable. The Fermata is full of jocular euphemisms. Arno’s penis is his ‘richard’, his ‘Juiceman’, his ‘stain-stick’, his ‘gender-beam’, his ‘bloated factotum’. Considering it in conjunction with the relevant testicles yields ‘moist troika’ and ‘trilogy-in-flesh’. Semen is ‘pecker-paste’ or ...

Time Longer than Rope

Greil Marcus, 16 November 1995

... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...

Conviction on the High Seas

Blair Worden, 6 February 1997

Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy 1650-68 
by Steven Pincus.
Cambridge, 506 pp., £45, May 1996, 0 521 43487 4
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... of international security to which any regime, whatever its complexion, would have had to give weight. The affairs of Catholic France and Spain tend to figure only when those countries directly involve themselves in Dutch developments. It is a pity, too, that Pincus passes silently over the tense Anglo-Dutch relations of the years 1654-60 and the struggles ...

Rogue’s Paradise

R.W. Johnson: The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova, 16 July 1998

The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War 
by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova.
Human and Rousseau/Combined Book Services, 287 pp., £17.99, June 1998, 0 7981 3804 1
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... depressed fellow prisoners, organising sports and other activities, even though he lost 90 lbs in weight. Returning to Russia, he showed similar courage in the face of the Bolsheviks, whom he detested, and ended his days selling cigarettes in Tbilisi marketplace, still dressed in princely garments. Some Russian aristocrats who came to fight were men of the ...

Eric the Nerd

Ian Hamilton: The Utterly Complete Orwell, 29 October 1998

The Complete Works of George Orwell 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Secker, £750, July 1998, 0 436 20377 4
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... on the whole batch. From this point on, Orwell’s satirical sketch begins to crumble beneath the weight of its own laborious hyperbole. ‘Do I seem to exaggerate?’ he asks and then he does one of his characteristic ‘Ask anyone’ corroborations. ‘Ask any regular reviewer ... whether he can deny in honesty that his habits and character are such as I ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: The Jubilee Line Extension, 20 January 2000

... years of steam and filth, a pioneering American emerged ‘with a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing and . . . a firm determination to encounter ten jams on Ludgate Hill rather than make another trip on the Underground railway of London’. Like mining accidents, the intermittent catastrophes on the Underground ...

Human Welfare

Paul Seabright, 18 August 1983

Utilitarianism and Beyond 
edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams.
Cambridge, 290 pp., £20, June 1982, 0 521 24296 7
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... are best exemplified in the three essays that give the theory their full support: those of Richard Hare, John Harsanyi and James Mirrlees. The first two are the only reprinted articles in this collection, and represent two by now well-known and influential approaches to justifying the theory. Hare’s essay expounds the derivation of utilitarianism ...

Severnside

David Cannadine, 21 March 1985

Elgar, the Man 
by Michael De-la-Noy.
Allen Lane/Viking, 340 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 7139 1532 3
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Edward Elgar: A Creative Life 
by Jerrold Northrop Moore.
Oxford, 841 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 19 315447 1
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Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in his World 
by Jerrold Northrop Moore.
Heinemann, 175 pp., £10.95, February 1984, 0 434 47541 6
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The Elgar-Atkins Friendship 
by E. Wulstan Atkins.
David and Charles, 510 pp., £15, April 1984, 0 7153 8583 6
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... use of the rich Elgar archives at Broadheath and in the Worcester and Hereford Record Office. In weight and work, these books together dwarf all previous Elgariana. The twice-told tale unfolded here is by now very familiar in its outlines. For the first forty years of Elgar’s life, there was little to suggest that genius, greatness and Gerontius were to ...

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