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Bee Wilson: Pinocchio, 1 January 2009

Pinocchio 
by Carlo Collodi, translated by Geoffrey Brock.
NYRB, 189 pp., £8.99, November 2008, 978 1 59017 289 6
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... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...

From Wooden to Plastic

James Meek: Jonathan Franzen, 24 September 2015

Purity 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 563 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 00 753276 6
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... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...

Vigah

Elizabeth Drew: JFK, 20 November 2003

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-63 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 838 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9737 0
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... affliction or another.’ Many of his early maladies went undiagnosed. He was unable to gain weight. (Later, he was treated for this with injections of testosterone, which, Dallek speculates, might have enhanced his already healthy libido.) As a teenager he was so skinny that his classmates called him ‘Rat Face’. His older brother, Joe, was not only ...

Nothing to Do with Me

Gaby Wood: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 5 June 2014

Henri Cartier-Bresson 
Pompidou Centre, until 8 June 2015Show More
‘Voir est un tout’: Entretiens et conversations 1951-98 
by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Centre Pompidou, 176 pp., €19.90, January 2014, 978 2 84426 639 2
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now 
edited by Clément Chéroux.
Thames and Hudson, 400 pp., £45, March 2014, 978 0 500 54430 3
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... on a bed; or rather, three legs, an arm, a hand, a lower back and some indeterminate muslin-weight clothing in the process of being peeled off. The triumph of the photograph is that it’s both explicit and mysterious, intimate yet almost abstract: how, you wonder, are its subjects entwined? Which way up are they? Are they men or women or one of ...

How the Laundry Basket Squeaked

Kirsty Gunn: Katherine Mansfield, 11 April 2013

The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol I 
edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan.
Edinburgh, 551 pp., £85, October 2012, 978 0 7486 4274 8
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The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Vol II 
edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan.
Edinburgh, 541 pp., £85, October 2012, 978 0 7486 4275 5
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... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...

The Atheists’ Picnic

Julian Bell: Art and Its Origins, 10 June 2010

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion 
by David Lewis-Williams.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £18.95, March 2010, 978 0 500 05164 1
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... such strand was weak and incomplete, strands from associated fields of research could carry the weight instead, allowing the story to clamber up towards a plateau of coherence. What height, then, had Lewis-Williams arrived at? Not actually at ‘an origin of image-making’, as one of the book’s chapter titles brashly claimed: he never fully told us why ...

Keep on nagging

Joanna Biggs: Azar Nafisi, 27 May 2010

Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter 
by Azar Nafisi.
Windmill, 336 pp., £8.99, February 2010, 978 0 09 948712 8
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... life of the mediatised book group: Oprah’s Book Club had just returned from a year’s break and Richard and Judy were about to launch a UK version. (It was also a good year for coffee: by 2003 there were 425 Starbucks branches in the UK, up from 50 in 1998.) Consumers across the Anglophone world faithfully bought books, nearly finished them and then joined ...

Confusion of Tongues

Steven Shapin: Scientific Languages, 3 December 2015

Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English 
by Michael Gordin.
Profile, 432 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 78125 114 0
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... it likely that their language would spread very far: the late 16th-century English lexicographer Richard Mulcaster observed that the ‘English tung … is of small reatch; it stretcheth no further than this Island of ours, naie not there ouer all’ (Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish were current on the Celtic fringes). Objections to English – even among the ...

In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts

Thomas Sugrue: Barry Goldwater, 3 January 2008

The Conscience of a Conservative 
by Barry Goldwater.
Princeton, 144 pp., £8.95, June 2007, 978 0 691 13117 7
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... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...

Tricky Minds

Michael Wood: Dostoevsky, 5 September 2002

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-81 
by Joseph Frank.
Princeton, 784 pp., £24.95, May 2002, 0 691 08665 6
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... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...

Much like the 1950s

David Edgar: The Sixties, 7 June 2007

White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Little, Brown, 878 pp., £22.50, August 2006, 0 316 72452 1
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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 
by Dominic Sandbrook.
Abacus, 892 pp., £19.99, May 2006, 0 349 11530 3
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... Freed earlier and more substantially than the British intellectual and student left from the dead weight of Communist orthodoxy, the American equivalent was able to enter into an alliance with disenfranchised Southern blacks which effectively desegregated the South in the decade following Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in ...

Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

... mentioned Alicia Machado, Miss Universe 1996, whom Trump had called ‘Miss Piggy’ for gaining weight at the time and ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she is Latina. Trump cannot stand to be criticised by someone he considers a ‘loser’ and Machado was on television telling tales of Trump’s humiliation of her twenty years ago. Five days later, at three ...

Why did we start farming?

Steven Mithen: Hunter-Gatherers Were Right, 30 November 2017

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 336 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 300 18291 0
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... the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...

Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... float exactly three floors above Equal (2015), four great stacks of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ...

Take that, astrolabe

Tom Johnson: Medieval Time, 19 October 2023

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life 
by Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm.
Reaktion, 247 pp., £20, March, 978 1 78914 679 0
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... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...

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