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Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
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... files. But a lot of water will flow under the bridges of the Moskva before Sorge’s file comes to light … Even if the Nazis find out sooner than we expect, what’s to keep a man who was a communist 15 years ago from changing his political opinion?Then he turned to an assistant: ‘Arrange to have him hired as the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his enthusiasms. To a casual teenaged visitor his self-centredness was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the ...

Samuel Johnson goes abroad

Claude Rawson, 29 August 1991

A Voyage to Abyssinia 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Joel Gold.
Yale, 350 pp., £39.50, July 1985, 0 300 03003 7
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Rasselas, and Other Tales 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Gwin Kolb.
Yale, 290 pp., £24.50, March 1991, 0 300 04451 8
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A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) 
by Samuel Johnson.
Longman, 1160 pp., £195, September 1990, 0 582 07380 4
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The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746-1773 
by Allen Reddick.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £30, October 1990, 0 521 36160 5
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Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts 
by Morris Brownell.
Oxford, 195 pp., £30, March 1989, 0 19 812956 4
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Johnson’s Shakespeare 
by G.F. Parker.
Oxford, 204 pp., £25, April 1989, 0 19 812974 2
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... had ‘so little of the savage’ that when he and Lord Mulgrave ‘sat with their backs to the light’ Johnson ‘was afraid to speak to either, lest I should mistake one for the other’. Omai was a fashionable object of wonder, a kind of Pygmalion’s freak, but Johnson’s response to him was in exact and literal conformity with his principled views on ...
... interpret these things. We are also familiar with the idea, developed powerfully in philosophy by Donald Davidson, that we could not come to understand these people without building into our interpretation at a structural level some assumptions about the ways in which their experience and thoughts resemble ours: that we must interpret what they say, for ...

Plot 6, Row C, Grave 15

Malcolm Gaskill: Death of an Airman, 8 November 2018

... moved like spirits in an airy loom,’ Cecil Lewis recalled, ‘where wind and cloud and light wove day and night long the endless fabric of the changing sky.’ Fernald, who aspired to be a writer like his father, contrasted the sordid battlefield below with ‘the blue sky dazzling in its radiance, and the horizon a glorious mixture of yellow, red ...

I prefer my mare

Matthew Bevis: Hardy’s Bad Behaviour, 10 October 2024

Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings 
edited by Ralph Pite.
Oxford, 608 pp., £19.99, February, 978 0 19 890486 1
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Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems 
edited by David Bromwich.
Yale, 456 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 09528 9
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Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry 
by Mark Ford.
Oxford, 244 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 0 19 288680 4
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... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

... detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of a conceit, feasible partly because ...

The Martyrdom of Hossein Kharrazi

Christopher de Bellaigue: In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, 2 January 2003

... or altered, to cast certain members of his entourage, who now occupy very high office, in a bad light. As far as I can ascertain, few people wanted to stop after Khorramshahr. Casualties – at most, sixty thousand Iranian dead – were sustainable. People were convinced that force could be used to export the Revolution. Israel’s invasion of South Lebanon ...

Keller’s Causes

Robin Holloway, 3 August 1995

Essays on Music 
by Hans Keller, edited by Christopher Wintle, Bayan Northcott and Irene Samuel.
Cambridge, 269 pp., £30, October 1994, 0 521 46216 9
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... Schoenbergian. Not that the classical tradition had been exactly ignored or unappreciated here. Donald Tovey, dying in 1940, had built up since the turn of the century a body of commentary covering exactly the same field, and comparable, too, in being predominantly occasional – programme notes, encyclopedia entries, contributions to symposia and so ...

Destination Unknown

William Davies: Sociology Gone Wrong, 9 June 2022

The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past 
by Mike Savage.
Harvard, 422 pp., £28.95, May 2021, 978 0 674 98807 1
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Colonialism and Modern Social Theory 
by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood.
Polity, 257 pp., £17.99, July 2021, 978 1 5095 4130 0
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A Brief History of Equality 
by Thomas Piketty.
Harvard, 272 pp., £22.95, April, 978 0 674 27355 9
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... and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians will be among the experts consulted. The public intellectual in the English-speaking world who has offered the most expansive sociological analyses of the ...

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics 
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4
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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4
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... even ordinary relationships emotionally unmanageable: the wife of her Oxford philosophy tutor Donald MacKinnon made him stop seeing her; a crisis in her feelings for Anscombe caused her to destroy seven pages of her journals.Foot and Murdoch shared a flat in London and became very close, but drama followed. Foot had been having an affair with the ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New Yorker. Katharine White, the poetry editor, soon offered her a first-read agreement.In the meantime, Rich had broken off her engagement to Sumner Powell, a Wasp Harvard boy, and fallen in love with the ...

One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5
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... no more real . . .’ ends with the lyrical iambic pentameter, ‘I feel the glass collide with light and day’), but it is impossible to judge what effect was intended. Dylan Thomas may have been happy to intone the poems at his reading (they are remarkably sonorous), but their difficulty prompted unenthusiastic reviews, including Hugh MacDiarmid’s ...

Shall I go on?

Colin Burrow: Loving Milton, 7 March 2013

The Complete Works of John Milton. Vol. VIII: De Doctrina Christiana 
edited by John Hale and J. Donald Cullington.
Oxford, 1263 pp., £225, September 2012, 978 0 19 923451 6
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Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42 
edited by Edward Jones.
Oxford, 343 pp., £60, November 2012, 978 0 19 969870 7
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The Complete Works of John Milton. Vol. III: The Shorter Poems 
edited by Barbara Lewalski and Estelle Haan.
Oxford, 632 pp., £125, October 2012, 978 0 19 960901 7
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... are hymns and psalm paraphrases as well as jokey university elegies, grand pastoral effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever ...

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