Entanglements

V.G. Kiernan, 4 August 1983

The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling 
edited by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 315 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 521 23444 1
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The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60 
edited by James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson.
Macmillan, 392 pp., £16, November 1982, 0 333 32971 6
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Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of 19th-Century Working Class Autobiography 
by David Vincent.
Methuen, 221 pp., £4.95, December 1982, 0 416 34670 7
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“... career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of commending ‘class struggle’ on British lines as good for both progress and stability: what he really stood for, Addison makes clear, was ‘a ...”

Lucian Freud

Nicholas Penny, 31 March 1988

“... which he scrutinises the broken glass bedded in the cement top of the wall in the front of one urban landscape and the thirty or so chimneys on the skyline in the other. These are good illustrations of his determination to make the familiar look unfamiliar, more specific, more distinct in personality, as he puts it. Freud planned to put figures in both ...”

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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“... rhythms of nature, consume resources sparingly, reduce the human population and do something about urban blight. It contains people who worry about the ozone layer, lead in petrol, and radioactive waste, people obsessed with recycling paper and people who like the Green Belt because it preserves property values. Pretty well everybody can be considered a friend ...”

Gilded Drainpipes

E.S. Turner: London, 10 June 1999

The London Rich: The Creation of a Great City from 1666 to the Present 
by Peter Thorold.
Viking, 374 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 670 87480 9
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The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture 
by Mordaunt Crook.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 7195 6040 3
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“... the complications of which often throttled the aspirations of the most powerful and headstrong. Urban demographers can trace in its pages the movements, migrations and preferred areas of newcomers. Planters and nabobs, we learn, tended to find houses in Soho Square or to colonise Marylebone. Denmark Hill became ‘Little Germany’. Jews sought out the once ...”

A Place for Hype

Edward Tenner: Old Technology, 10 May 2007

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 
by David Edgerton.
Profile, 270 pp., £18.99, January 2007, 978 1 86197 296 5
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“... bookcase. The horse may be the most surprising case. Edgerton emphasises its continuing role in urban transportation and in warfare in the early to mid-20th century. Hitler’s army marched on Moscow with many more horses than Napoleon’s, and in 1945 the German army had 1.2 million of them, possibly an even higher ratio of horses to men than in previous ...”

The Rack, the Rapier, the Ruff and the Fainting Nun

Nicholas Penny: Manet/Velázquez, 10 July 2003

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting 
by Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre et al.
Yale, 592 pp., £50, March 2003, 0 300 09880 4
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“... bland smiling bullfighters. But there is one American painter whose absence is to be regretted. George Bellows gave to the handling of Manet and Sargent a novel slap and punch which suited the violence and velocity of New York. We forget, among all the high society in this last room, that the Spanish Old Masters had also been drawn to rags and ...”

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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“... intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban communities, Slotkin identifies the banking crisis of 2007-8, the Covid pandemic and changes in the racial and ethnic make-up of the American population. To these familiar culprits he adds a deeper problem: a lack of unifying ‘national myths’ that ...”

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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“... is the usual end point. Thomas Pynchon once described Barthelme’s melancholy as ‘specifically urban’, but it’s also the mood of a particular time and class. His protagonists fret about la vie quotidienne (they use the French) – ‘What made us think that we could escape things like bankruptcy, alcoholism, being disappointed, having ...”

Squawking at the Gate

Malcolm Gaskill: The Last Menagerie, 8 October 2026

The Leopard in the Garden: Animal and Human Lives in Paris at the First Public Zoo of the Modern Era 
by Richard W. Burkhardt.
Chicago, 768 pp., £44, April, 978 0 226 84397 1
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“... globe and studying its minutiae were different aspects of the same imperial ambition. Chartered by George IV, London Zoo started out as a private research establishment; so, a decade later, did Artis, its equivalent in Amsterdam, the motto of which remains Natura Artis Magistra, ‘Nature is the Teacher of Art’. Berlin Zoo followed in 1844, thanks to ...”

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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“... frightened by the uprisings in Harlem, Watts, Newark and other places as they were by the rise of urban crime and heroin use. As Nixon’s advisor H.R. Haldeman recalled, Nixon ‘emphasised that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.’ 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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“... but he mostly wrote genre fiction: existential potboilers, family dramas, ribald comedies, urban noirs. His prose was lean and gritty, and his plots often so dense with incident that they were difficult to follow. The intellectual seriousness of Ellison, the prophetic eloquence of Baldwin, the allegorical fire of Wright: these high notes eluded ...”

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

“... from Camp Abu Naji and the vehicles trundled along a dimly lit road. ‘It was a sort of urban area but with a lot of waste ground,’ Blackett says. ‘A few buildings on the road, a few shops, and very dark. Very few people. It was one of the roads leading out of town.’ ‘He was happy. He seemed cheerful,’ says Guardsman Gary Alderson, who was ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

“... is then flung out of the window.Had Harriet G. not told me the story I would put it down as an urban myth. But it isn’t, the most chilling part of the saga the syringe changing hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be ...”

East Hoathly makes a night of it

Marilyn Butler, 6 December 1984

The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754-1765 
edited by David Vaisey.
Oxford, 386 pp., £17.50, November 1984, 0 19 211782 3
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John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings 
edited by Eric Robinson.
Oxford, 185 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 19 211774 2
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John Clare: The Journals, Essays, and the Journey from Essex 
edited by Anne Tibble.
Carcanet, 139 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 85635 344 2
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The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare 
edited by Margaret Grainger.
Oxford, 397 pp., £35, January 1984, 0 19 818517 0
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John Clare and the Folk Tradition 
by George Deacon.
Sinclair Browne, 397 pp., £15, February 1983, 0 86300 008 8
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“... cultural history of a parish, assembled from the inside. This material is selected and analysed in George Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition, one of the most informative and valuable studies of Clare’s poetry yet to appear. The total oeuvre proves him to have been an observer of his rural habitat on the same scale as Turner, though Clare’s ...”

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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“... included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by French-based artists.Francis Bacon, whose work Berger reviewed in ...”