Every Penny a Vote

Alexander Zevin: Neoliberalism, 15 August 2019

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism 
by Quinn Slobodian.
Harvard, 381 pp., £25.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97952 9
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... level’ to restore competitiveness to Austrian industry on the world market. As finance minister, Joseph Schumpeter, his brilliant and erratic classmate at the University of Vienna, wanted to tackle inflation with a capital levy, which shocked Mises. When the socialist foreign minister, Otto Bauer, another former classmate, put forward a plan for limited ...

Lemon and Pink

David Trotter: The Sorrows of Young Ford, 1 June 2000

Return to Yesterday 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Bill Hutchings.
Carcanet, 330 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 397 1
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War Prose 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Max Saunders.
Carcanet, 276 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 396 3
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... petulant, from the performance writers make of their art. A chapter which begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour ...

Issues for His Prose Style

Andrew O’Hagan: Hemingway, 7 June 2012

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22 
edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon.
Cambridge, 431 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 521 89733 4
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... who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry shows the two writers dancing round each other for several decades, making much of their differences and generally vying for supremacy.3 But these American modernists, Fitzgerald ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a larger process of recognition enacted by both the audience and the ...

Are we there yet?

David Simpson: Abasing language, abusing prisoners, 17 February 2005

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror 
by Mark Danner.
Granta, 573 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 9781862077720
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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib 
edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
Cambridge, 1284 pp., £27.50, February 2005, 0 521 85324 9
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... in response to the photographic evidence of abuse handed to his superior officers by Specialist Joseph Darby. Major General Taguba filed his report in early March, six weeks before some of the photos (but only a few) were published. In all the reports reprinted in these books, acronyms constantly distract the reader from any actual agents or victims under ...

For Those Who Don’t Know

Julian Bell: Van Gogh’s Letters, 5 November 2009

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters 
edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, translated by Michael Hoyle et al.
Thames and Hudson, 2180 pp., £395, October 2009, 978 0 500 23865 3
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... with characters who could slot straight back into the corniest of triple-deckers, such as Joseph Roulin, the indefatigably good-hearted Arles postman with a passion for General Boulanger, or the still more angelically benevolent Johanna Bonger, the sweetie Theo marries in 1889. Its protagonist, though, is larger than anything outside Dostoevsky or ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... to accept their view of Britain’s global role. Their great good fortune was that in 1903 Joseph Chamberlain united the Liberals in opposition to his Tariff Reform scheme, which to Grey was a perfect example of dangerous Tory imperialist froth. It destroyed the principle of free trade in pursuit of a fantasy of imperial consolidation that was at odds ...

Among the Flutterers

Colm Tóibín: The Pope Wears Prada, 19 August 2010

The Pope Is Not Gay 
by Angelo Quattrocchi, translated by Romy Clark Giuliani.
Verso, 181 pp., £8.90, June 2010, 978 1 84467 474 9
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... black sheep in the ever darkening sex abuse scandal. Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed ‘God’s Rottweiler’ when he was the Church’s enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...

On Not Going Home

James Wood, 20 February 2014

... McGuinness’s Other People’s Countries; the half-Nigerian, half-Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi; Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which makes acute distinctions between the privileged economic migration of the Dutch banker who narrates the novel, and the much less privileged immigration of the Trinidadian trickster who is the book’s tragic hero; the work ...

A Singular Entity

Peter C. Perdue: Classical China, 20 May 2021

What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History 
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019, 978 0 674 73714 3
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... led to a serious reconsideration of the classical tradition. It was at that time, the historian Joseph Levenson argued, that Chinese scholars ceased to write within a ‘tradition’ and began to write instead as ‘traditionalists’, vainly asserting the validity of a culture that would soon die out. Intellectuals who aim to restore the study of the ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... Like Harman, Graner was a keen amateur photojournalist. At one point he shows an MP colleague, Joseph Darby, a picture of an inmate, naked apart from a bag over his head, sitting in a puddle. Graner tells Darby: ‘The Christian in me knows it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me can’t help but love to make a grown man piss himself.’ However ...

On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer 
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8
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... 1591), Spenser’s ‘Visions of Petrarch’ in Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... a space that very soon became a single compacted block, an uncelebrated curation in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, or Phyllida Barlow’s recent mounds at Tate Britain. The higher they stack the investment silos of target architecture, the more those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly ...