Fundamental Brainwork

Jerome McGann, 30 March 2000

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Collected Writings 
edited by Jan Marsh.
Dent, 531 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 460 87875 1
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter and Poet 
by Jan Marsh.
Weidenfeld, 592 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 297 81703 5
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... now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his imperium was very broad. It encompassed the leading intellectuals of the period as well as a popular audience created and nourished by many cultural entrepreneurs. As with Walter Scott and so many others, that success and influence would ...

When Labour Was New

Malcolm Petrie: Labour’s First Government, 20 June 2024

The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government 
by Peter Clark.
Haus, 293 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 913368 81 4
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The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., £20, January, 978 1 3994 1143 1
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... strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William Adamson, Vernon Hartshorn, Thomas Shaw and Stephen Walsh, were trade union moderates; others, like Fred Jowett and John Wheatley, were socialists from the Independent Labour Party (ILP) strongholds of West Yorkshire and Clydeside. In addition, there were the Fabian intellectuals Sydney Olivier and Sidney ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...

The Mouth of Calamities

Musab Younis: Césaire’s Reversals, 5 December 2024

Return to My Native Land 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock.
Penguin, 65 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 53539 4
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. . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by Alex Gil.
Duke, 298 pp., £22.99, August 2024, 978 1 4780 3064 5
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Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits 
by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Oxford, 160 pp., £70, February 2024, 978 0 19 286722 3
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... self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former puerile fantasies./No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great.’ In one of its most lyrical passages, the poem becomes a hymn tothose who could harness neither steam nor electricitythose who explored neither the ...

Defoe or the Devil

Pat Rogers, 2 March 1989

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Yale, 210 pp., £20, February 1988, 0 300 04119 5
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The ‘Tatler’: Vols I-III 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 590 pp., £60, July 1987, 0 19 818614 2
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The ‘Spectator’: Vols I-V 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 512 pp., £55, October 1987, 9780198186106
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... for writers such as Abel Boyer, George Ridpath and Thomas Burnet; even such a nameless name as Stephen Whatley, too obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of his day. Even where no such individual can be ...

The pleasure of not being there

Peter Brooks, 18 November 1993

Benjamin Constant: A Biography 
by Dennis Wood.
Routledge, 321 pp., £40, June 1993, 0 415 01937 0
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Isabelle de Charrière (Belle de Zuylen): A Biography 
by C.P Courtney.
Voltaire Foundation, 810 pp., £49, August 1993, 0 7294 0439 0
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... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...

Jamboree

John Sturrock, 20 February 1986

Handbook of Russian Literature 
edited by Victor Terras.
Yale, 558 pp., £25, April 1985, 0 300 03155 6
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Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time 
by Roman Jakobson, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy.
Blackwell, 208 pp., £25, July 1985, 0 631 14262 2
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Historic Structures: The Prague School Project 1928-1946 
by F.W. Galan.
Croom Helm, 250 pp., £22.50, May 1985, 0 7099 3816 0
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Mikhail Bakhtin 
by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist.
Harvard, 398 pp., £19.95, February 1985, 0 674 57416 8
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The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics 
by M.M. Bakhtin and P.M. Medvedev, translated by Albert Wehrle.
Harvard, 191 pp., £7.50, May 1985, 0 674 30921 9
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Dialogues between Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska 
translated by Christian Hubert.
Cambridge, 186 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 521 25113 3
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The Dialogical Principle 
by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Wlad Godzich.
Manchester, 132 pp., £25, February 1985, 0 7190 1466 2
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Rabelais and his World 
by Mikhail Bakhtin, translated by Hélène Iswolsky.
Indiana, 484 pp., $29.50, August 1984, 0 253 20341 4
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... it comes to the point at which Jakobson should pass from the grammatical ‘realm’, where he is king, to the semantic realm, where a certain democracy obtains, he fizzles out. He asks us to believe that through the grammar of a poem we have a prime access to the sense, but he never proves it. Jakobson’s poetics follow rather too strictly from his ...

Beast of a Nation

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland’s Self-Pity, 31 October 2002

Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland 
by Neal Ascherson.
Granta, 305 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 1 86207 524 7
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... about the Stone was precisely its absence: the fact that it had been carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... Bellow has read and taught all his life, allows Buck Mulligan in Ulysses to give a comic twist to Stephen Dedalus’s similar pretensions that he is of divine origins and divinely inspired: I’m the queerest young fellow that you ever heard. My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here’s to disciples and ...

Diary

David Bromwich: The Establishment President, 13 May 2010

... a thing. It alters obviously and with discernible intent, according to its audience: taking on King-like overtones for a crowd of black people; in the Midwest dropping the terminal g and dipping into homey cadences (‘What we’re tryin’ to do’); massively sober in speeches to Congress but relaxed in town-hall meetings (with reliance on the word ...

Moral Lepers

John Banville: Easter 1916, 16 July 2015

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 433 pp., £10.99, May 2015, 978 0 241 95424 9
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... Pearse himself: he had suggested inviting Prince Joachim, younger son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to be King of Ireland. It is fascinating to think that German might now be one of Ireland’s official languages, along with English and Irish. How complicated are the affairs of even the smallest nations. Roy Foster is one of the finest contemporary Irish ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading room, battered but still grand, readers waited for their number to appear on the indicator ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... views is also misleading. In a powerful and ingenious essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, Stephen Greenblatt shows that even an idea as apparently subversive as the ‘atheism’ of the Renaissance – the Machiavellian notion that religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a ...

The Politics of Translation

Marina Warner: Translate this!, 11 October 2018

This Little Art 
by Kate Briggs.
Fitzcarraldo, 365 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 910695 45 6
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Translation as Transhumance 
by Mireille Gansel, translated by Ros Schwartz.
Les Fugitives, 150 pp., £10, November 2017, 978 0 9930093 3 4
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Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto 
by Mark Polizzotti.
MIT, 168 pp., £17.99, May 2018, 978 0 262 03799 0
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The 100 Best Novels in Translation 
by Boyd Tonkin.
Galileo, 304 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 903385 67 8
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The Work of Literary Translation 
by Clive Scott.
Cambridge, 285 pp., £75, June 2018, 978 1 108 42682 4
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... Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy poems, which were illustrated by 12 of the etchings. The transmission of the poems, from the cultural ...

Diary

Antonia Hitchens: At CPAC, 20 March 2025

... despite the lawsuits that had been filed in response to some of them, many remained untouched; Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and architect of many of the orders, had reportedly prepared the administration for far more litigation.Enrique Tarrio showed up to heckle attendees at the Principles First conference. The next day it was interrupted by a ...