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What’s It All About?

Tom Lubbock, 6 April 1995

Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the Nineties 
by Sarah Kent.
Zwemmer, 270 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 302 00648 6
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The Reviews that Caused the Rumpus, and Other Pieces 
by Brian Sewell.
Bloomsbury, 365 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 7475 1872 6
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... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...

The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale

Stephen Holmes: ‘The Communist Manifesto’, 29 October 1998

The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition 
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Verso, 82 pp., £8, April 1998, 1 85984 898 2
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... one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.’ Hobsbawm, John Gray and others have claimed that the Manifesto remains a momentous work because it foretold the inexorable course of globalisation. The problem is, Marx did not warn against globalisation: he welcomed it. Indeed he exalted it. It spelled, he thought, the ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

... of truth commission, which could provide information, set events in proper historical context and foster reconciliation. This is what the government claims it has delivered, comparing its new system to the reconciliation process in South Africa.Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister, said last October that the Act was needed ‘because the chances of ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... and was moved by the British authorities to an army field hospital. She spent three years with foster families in England, then moved to America to study at Athene College, where Lonoff was on the staff. It was years before she learned (from a newspaper article) that her father had survived. Then she had to decide whether to make herself known to the ...

The Pessimist’s Optimist

Kevin Okoth: Beyond the Postcolony, 10 July 2025

Brutalism 
by Achille Mbembe, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Duke, 181 pp., £19.99, January 2024, 978 1 4780 2558 0
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... cultures as well as the ‘Indigenous’ philosophical systems described by Alexis Kagame or John S. Mbiti, was one example. As Senghor put it in 1939, ‘emotion is Negro, just as reason is Hellenic.’ (Souleymane Bachir Diagne has argued that this quote, from Senghor’s essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, is widely misunderstood, and refers ...

Big Pod

Richard Poirier: How Podhoretz Dumped His Friends, 2 September 1999

Ex-Friends 
by Norman Podhoretz.
Free Press, 256 pp., $25, February 1999, 0 684 85594 1
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... at the time especially vexing, had decided that his ambition, unstated though it was, was to help foster this American consensus. He admired Commentary’s film critic, Robert Warshow, for once saying, ‘A man watches a movie and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man’ – ordinary in his reaction however exceptional his talents for ...

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
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... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... Hong Kong. A clever scholarship boy of Irish ancestry who grew up in West London, he shares with John Major a modest show-business background – his father published a pop hit, ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hooly Hooly Skirt’. ‘We were low-to-lower middle class. I can describe these gradations with laserlike accuracy,’ Patten told his New Yorker ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and restraining orders.’ He was talking about husbands and lovers whose fathers and grandfathers had appeared before him on the same charges in the course of his ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... weapon in negotiations’ between member states, van Middelaar argues that its effect is to foster not conflict but agreement. ‘It is the psychological certainty of being able to block a resolution if you truly oppose it that makes consensus possible.’ Indeed, even when the principle of majority decisions was formally enshrined in certain areas of ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... the responsibility of running the country; the black middle class Smith was apparently trying to foster; the paternalistic British-descended white farmers who paid their black workers partly in money, partly in food; the harsh Afrikaner farmers who chained their black workers up; the even less pleasant Portuguese. Of all his Rhodesia memories he was most ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... aunt and uncle and three children’ he had worked with; some of them had been approved as foster carers. David had family meetings with them and had spoken regularly to them on the phone. ‘I guess that was the first thing I was thinking,’ he said, ‘about any families that we knew or have known, and just checking, are they OK? Are they alive and ...

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