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 ...

Coins in the Cash Drawer

Philippe Marlière: Jean Jaurès’s Socialism, 2 November 2023

A Socialist History of the French Revolution 
by Jean Jaurès, translated by Mitchell Abidor.
Pluto, 259 pp., £19.99, July, 978 0 7453 4219 1
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Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism 
edited by Jean-Numa Ducange and Elisa Marcobelli, translated by David Broder.
Palgrave, 158 pp., £89.99, June 2022, 978 3 030 71961 6
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... Jean​ Jaurès was a deserving child of the French republican meritocracy. An outstanding pupil from the town of Castres, near Toulouse, he came top in the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure, where he specialised in philosophy. In 1885, at the age of 25, he was elected as a Republican deputy for his home town. During his first term in the National Assembly, Jaurès worked on two theses for his doctorate at the Sorbonne, one in French and the other in Latin ...

Music without Artifice

Peter Phillips: Tomás Luis de Victoria, 15 December 2022

The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603) 
by Owen Rees.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £22.99, September 2021, 978 1 107 67621 3
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... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... with enthusiasm in 1984-85, as more rough and ready activists, reminiscent of the ‘denims’ in David Peace’s miners’ strike novel, GB84. But Gildea’s history of community mobilisation challenges the Conservatives’ depiction of unionised miners as a threat to democracy, Thatcher’s ‘enemy within’.Raymond Williams thought that the ...

Does marmalade exist?

Terry Eagleton, 27 January 2022

The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, Idleness and Utopia 
by Malcolm Bull.
Verso, 243 pp., £16.99, October 2021, 978 1 84467 293 6
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... that their masters don’t habitually roll out the tanks. We need also to take account of David Hume, who writes rather surprisingly that ‘force is always on the side of the governed,’ meaning that governments stay in power on the back of public opinion. For Bull, by contrast, the survival of the state is not a question of opinion, or even perhaps ...

Diary

Tom Johnson: Strange Visitations, 15 August 2024

... chaplain, no less); John Hull the piper with Alison, a blood relative of his former wife; David Webbe with Eve Elvell. Most of them were reported to be ‘outside’ the parish; that is, beyond the reach of the bishop’s crozier. But one more thing, reverend father: ‘John, chaplain, as it seems to them, is not firm in his faith, because he has ...

Love Me or I Shoot You

Christienna Fryar: Three Imperial Wars, 1 August 2024

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire 
by Erik Linstrum.
Oxford, 313 pp., £26.99, April 2023, 978 0 19 757203 0
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... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...

I cannot explain my wife

Joanna Biggs: ‘Biography of X’, 4 May 2023

Biography of X 
by Catherine Lacey.
Granta, 394 pp., £18.99, April, 978 1 78378 927 6
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... Aviv, Joshua Rivkin, Chiara Barzini), in the fictional footnotes, and real people (Kathy Acker, David Bowie, Connie Converse) in the fiction, and real people (Susan Sontag, Fleur Jaeggy, Kaitlin Phillips) in the real endnotes. Lacey has said her intent was random and irreverent – ‘There’s no hidden agenda or code,’ she told the New York Times ...

Trapped in a Veil

Leo Robson: ‘The Bee Sting’, 5 October 2023

The Bee Sting 
by Paul Murray.
Hamish Hamilton, 656 pp., £18.99, June, 978 0 241 35395 0
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... is deployed in a more realist setting, and more relentlessly. Reading it, I was reminded of David Shields’s remark that with most conventional novels, ‘you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written.’ Here the key term is, once again, ‘the future’, a quantity that the ...

Showing Off

Laleh Khalili: Superyachts, 9 May 2024

Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquillity and Ecocide 
by Grégory Salle.
Polity, 122 pp., £12.99, January, 978 1 5095 5995 4
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... many also discreetly own private islands. On the West Coast, the yacht-owning Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their ...