Sterling and Strings

Peter Davies: Harold Wilson and Vietnam, 20 November 2008

... days later, he relayed his grave misgivings about American policy to the US ambassador to London, David Bruce. If America continued in its escalation of the conflict, he warned, it could cause the biggest rupture in Anglo-American relations since the Suez crisis. But this threat was never carried through, and Wilson would continue to provide Lyndon Johnson ...

Inside the Barrel

Brent Hayes Edwards: The French Slave Trade, 10 September 2009

Memoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la memoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions 
by Edouard Glissant.
Gallimard, 192 pp., €14.90, May 2007, 978 2 07 078554 4
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The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade 
by Christopher Miller.
Duke, 571 pp., £20.99, March 2008, 978 0 8223 4151 2
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... is usually credited with providing the philosophical foundation for abolitionism; according to David Brion Davis, by the mid-1700s ‘the classical justifications for slavery, already discredited by Montesquieu and Hutcheson, were being demolished by the arguments of Rousseau, Diderot and other philosophes.’ Miller acknowledges the existence of powerful ...

To Be Worth Forty Shillings

Jonah Miller: Early Modern Inequality, 2 February 2017

Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England 
by Alexandra Shepard.
Oxford, 357 pp., £65, February 2015, 978 0 19 960079 3
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... except their labour. In their 1979 case study of Terling, a village in Essex, Keith Wrightson and David Levine described a massive upward redistribution of wealth between 1525 and 1700, and descriptions of early modern society since theirs have been full of people like Edward Ballard, a ‘pore needy felloe’ with ‘noe certen place of aboad’ living apart ...

Showers of Hats

Robert Baird: ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, 30 March 2017

Lincoln in the Bardo 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, March 2017, 978 1 4088 7174 4
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... His stories were filled with perverted theme parks, creepy testing facilities and grungy sci-fi conceits, all rendered in a hypercolloquial idiolect that set the chipper barbarities of capitalism in scathing relief. When CivilWarLand appeared, in the mid-1990s, it was quickly swept up into one of America’s rare and mysterious revolutions in ...

Fried Fish

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Colson Whitehead, 17 November 2016

The Underground Railroad 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fleet, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2016, 978 0 7088 9839 0
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... adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David Foster Wallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published ...

At Dulwich

Alice Spawls: Vanessa Bell, 18 May 2017

... More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth ...

You Know Who You Are

Colin Kidd: About Last Year, 25 January 2018

Fall Out: A Year Of Political Mayhem 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 559 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 0 00 826438 3
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... with Brussels and the EU 27, reporting back directly not to his own secretary of state, David Davis, but to the prime minister? The magnitude of Brexit is daunting enough, but, within the realm of what was manageable, did the May government marshal its counsellors as effectively as it could have done? Cameron’s European advisers had deliberately ...

Useful Only for Scrap Paper

Charles Hope: Michelangelo’s Drawings, 8 February 2018

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer 
Metropolitan Museum, New York, until 12 February 2018Show More
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... an unfinished bust of Brutus, an unfinished statue of a standing figure possibly representing David and possibly Apollo, and the so-called Manhattan Boy, a very damaged and puzzling figure first identified in New York about half a century ago, and then forgotten until the 1990s. The attribution has often been questioned, but there is good evidence that it ...

Ends of the Earth

Jeremy Harding: ‘Mimesis: African Soldier’, 6 December 2018

Mimesis: African Soldier 
by John Akomfrah.
Imperial War Museum, until 30 March 2018
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... the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort’.By the turn of the century, as David Olusoga explained in The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (2014), Britain had already sorted its Indian subjects into martial races (mostly hardy mountain types from the Punjab and Nepal) and effeminate races (typically people of the plateau and ...

Monk Justice

Kieran Setiya, 30 August 2018

Philosophy within Its Proper Bounds 
by Edouard Machery.
Oxford, 224 pp., £40, August 2017, 978 0 19 880752 0
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... myopia’ for drawing lines between empirical psychology and philosophy. He urges a return to David Hume and William Whewell, for whom the two fields were one. ‘For much of the history of philosophy,’ Machery writes, ‘philosophers could not have imagined their philosophising as separate from not only mathematics, but also the empirical ...

Dots and Dashes

Namara Smith: Nick Drnaso, 4 April 2019

Sabrina 
by Nick Drnaso.
Granta, 203 pp., £16.99, June 2018, 978 1 78378 490 5
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... is to blame?’ The crime itself is oddly anachronistic. It’s more than twenty years since David Foster Wallace placed a lethally entertaining video cartridge at the centre of Infinite Jest. Who records a videotape these days? Who sends out dozens of copies of that tape by mail? When the first tape surfaces, at a local news station in Chicago, the ...

Tremendous in His Wrath

Eric Foner: George Washington, Slave Owner, 19 December 2019

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon 
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January 2019, 978 0 8139 4184 4
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... irrelevant. During a visit to Richmond soon after the end of the Civil War, the Scottish minister David Macrae met a slave who complained of past mistreatment while acknowledging that he had never been whipped. ‘How were you cruelly treated then?’ Macrae asked. ‘I was cruelly treated,’ the freedman answered, ‘because I was held in ...

We want our Mars Bars!

Will Frears: Arsène Who?, 7 January 2021

My Life in Red and White 
by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4746 1824 3
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... boring Arsenal. Even when they won, they were losers.In 1989, while coaching Monaco, Wenger met David Dein, the Arsenal vice chairman. Wenger went to an Arsenal match and after the game shared a cigarette with a friend of Barbara Dein, David’s wife. He was invited to their house in Totteridge, North London, for supper ...

Eels on Cocaine

Emily Witt, 22 April 2021

No One Is Talking about This 
by Patricia Lockwood.
Bloomsbury, 210 pp., £14.99, February, 978 1 5266 2976 0
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... rhinestone of a Juicy Couture sweatsuit. Reading this novel, I thought (warily? unfortunately?) of David Foster Wallace, also white, also Midwestern, though the child of college professors. The portal has censured Wallace for his mawkish depictions of trans people, for stalking Mary Karr and for being the patron saint of pedantic male suitors since 1996. But ...

Plots don’t stop

Leo Robson: ‘The World and All That It Holds’, 13 April 2023

The World and All That It Holds 
by Aleksandar Hemon.
Picador, 336 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 330 51332 6
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... the backdrop of the War on Terror. Soon afterwards, he began working with the Wachowskis on a sci-fi series for Netflix. In his essay ‘The Transformative Experience of Writing for Sense8’, Hemon explained that he was already an admirer of long-form television, but hadn’t previously been interested in doing that kind of writing himself. Having now tried ...