The dead are all around us

Hilary Mantel: Helen Duncan, 10 May 2001

Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches 
by Malcolm Gaskill.
Fourth Estate, 402 pp., £15.99, April 2001, 1 84115 109 2
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... the issue of the paranormal is vulnerable, both to accusations of crankiness and to a sort of self-disgust about the sensationalism involved; and it is hard to sift out an acceptable truth, given the human tendency to confabulate, the fallibility of memory, the wide scope for interpretation, and the prejudice which invests the whole subject. As a good ...

Behind the Sandwall

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Shame, 23 February 2006

Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony? 
by Toby Shelley.
Zed, 215 pp., £16.95, November 2004, 1 84277 341 0
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... of the UN unfold in practice: commitment to the rule of international law and the right of self-determination; also to the right of large numbers of people – above all, to the UN’s way of thinking, people in Africa – to place marked and folded papers in sealed boxes. The UN announced the creation of a mission to the territory (Minurso) and began ...

Horny Robot Baby Voice

James Vincent: On AI Chatbots, 10 October 2024

... any form of writing does. For thousands of years we have used writing to extend the reach of the self through seals, spells, inscriptions, letters, books and pamphlets. In the case of bots modelled on real individuals, might they not wield some diluted form of that individual’s authority? Letters and contracts already perform this function, while the ...

America and Israel

Ian Gilmour, 18 February 1982

The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East 
by Mahmoud Riad.
Quartet, 365 pp., £11.95, October 1981, 0 7043 2297 8
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Palestinian Self-Determination 
by Hassan Bin Talal.
Quartet, 138 pp., £6.95, July 1981, 0 7043 2312 5
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This Year in Jerusalem 
by Kenneth Cragg.
Darton, Longman and Todd, 192 pp., £5.95, February 1982, 0 232 51524 7
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... the Palestine part of the agreement would be much more than cosmetic. There was going to be no self-determination for the Palestinians. Once again, the Israelis had succeeded in bending the Americans to their will. Peace between Israel and Egypt would have been universally welcomed, had it been linked to the achievement of a comprehensive settlement. But ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... was he demasculated? He looks pretty tough from the word go (even Norden describes him as ‘a self-assured, goal-orientated fellow’). The dismal equation of disability with an internal defectiveness is so thorough that it seems to have bewitched him into overlooking a rare exception, where the character who is physically impaired is the one to embody ...

Saartjie Baartman’s Ghost

Hilary Mantel: The New Apartheid, 20 September 2007

When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of Aids in South Africa 
by Didier Fassin, translated by Amy Jacobs and Gabrielle Varro.
California, 365 pp., £12.95, April 2007, 978 0 520 25027 7
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The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight against Aids 
by Helen Epstein.
Viking, 326 pp., £16.99, July 2007, 978 0 670 91356 5
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... Each has a different experience of colonialism, a different narrative of independence, a different self-image; accordingly, the epidemic has been viewed differently, tackled differently. Her well-organised book is practical, concrete and full of hard information, but it lacks nothing in subtlety; she is conscious of the ambivalence and complexity that hedge ...

Unconditional Looking

David Trotter: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons, 23 October 2025

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9
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‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3
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... a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs Richard Dalloway. It is Peter who has held her feet most relentlessly to the fire, and now he’s back in London after three decades as a colonial administrator in India, mannerisms intact – notably the habit ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet ...

Dead Not Deid

James Meek: A Great Radical Modernist, 22 May 2008

Kieron Smith, Boy 
by James Kelman.
Hamish Hamilton, 422 pp., £18.99, April 2008, 978 0 241 14241 7
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... fine detail of the everyday, delighting in twisting clichés against themselves, clinical, witty, self-deprecating, judging. The voice was there; the characters, I thought, were obliged to dress themselves in it, each one a different hero. Rab Hines, the working man with the young family, in The Busconductor Hines (1984); Tammas, the young gambler of A ...

His Generation

Keith Gessen: A Sad Old Literary Man, 19 June 2008

Alfred Kazin: A Biography 
by Richard Cook.
Yale, 452 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 300 11505 5
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... first ones to have sex’ – to which his ex-wife Ann Birstein responded: ‘Talk about self-made men’), and it was through his reviews that he was able to respond to the shifts in the fates of that generation. When the Menshevik New Leader began to support the McCarthyist crusade in the early 1950s, Kazin announced that he would no longer ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Eccentric Pilgrims, 30 June 2016

... helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm. A vortex of self-inflating cartoon energy always seen to be doing something dramatic where no intervention is required, or burying inconvenient papers, facts and people, when the real problems of the disintegrating megacity could not be ameliorated by a visible headline ...

Human Spanner

Stuart Jeffries: Kant Come Alive, 17 June 2021

Correspondence 1923-66: Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer 
edited by Wolfgang Schopf, translated by Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler.
Polity, 537 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 7456 4923 8
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Kracauer: A Biography 
by Jörg Später, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Polity, 584 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3301 5
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... the usual story of the worldly sage and his impressionable pupil, however. Friedel was insecure, self-conscious about his stutter and his looks (which were ‘extraterritorial’, according to Adorno), while Teddie, whom the sociologist Leo Löwenthal described as ‘the pampered young gentleman from a well-to-do family’, was rarely troubled by ...

V-2 into Space

Adam Mars-Jones: Michael Chabon, 2 March 2017

Moonglow 
by Michael Chabon.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £18.99, January 2017, 978 0 00 754891 0
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... freedom to invent. This isn’t done because of a shortage of real-world material, let alone from self-importance – it’s an investigation into the instability of genre and the shifting nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the ...

Reversing the Freight Train

Geoff Mann: The Case for Degrowth, 18 August 2022

Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth 
by Per Espen Stoknes.
MIT, 360 pp., £15.99, April, 978 0 262 54385 9
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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World 
by Jason Hickel.
Windmill, 318 pp., £10.99, February 2021, 978 1 78609 121 5
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Post Growth: Life after Capitalism 
by Tim Jackson.
Polity, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 5095 4252 9
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The Case for Degrowth 
by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria.
Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3563 7
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... capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the ...

Paraphrase me if you dare

Colin Burrow: Stanley Cavell’s Sadness, 9 June 2022

Here and There: Sites of Philosophy 
by Stanley Cavell, edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary and Sandra Laugier.
Harvard, 326 pp., £23.95, May, 978 0 674 27048 0
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... universality to itself, which is what philosophers get paid to do, but it is also histrionically self-flagellating: the combination of ‘impressing’ and the ‘human subjection to words’ has a faint flavour of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ to it, as though words, unreadable by the victim, are inscribed in his body by a diabolical machine, ripping ...