Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
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“... duly formed democratic assemblies and experimented with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a ...”

Diary

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

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

Catacomb Graffiti

Clive James, 20 December 1979

Poems and Journeys 
by Charles Johnston.
Bodley Head, 97 pp., £3.90
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Eugene Onegin 
by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston.
Penguin Classics, 238 pp., £1.50
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“... somehow a stiff upper lip makes eloquence all the more arresting. Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbour he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he ...”

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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“... up to six thousand couples at once) for which the Moonies are famous. (One of the biggest of these took place in 1982 in Madison Square Garden.) In effect, Moon’s strategy was to attempt to make himself indispensable to the Seoul regime, the KCIA, the CIA and the American Right, apparently on the assumption that with patrons as powerful as these he would be ...”

No Company, No Carpets

Tim Parks: Tolstoy v. Tolstaya, 26 April 2018

Tolstoy and Tolstaya: A Portrait of a Life in Letters 
by Andrew Donskov, translated by John Woodsworth, Arkadi Klioutchanski and Liudmila Gladkova.
Ottawa, 430 pp., £48, May 2017, 978 0 7766 2471 6
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“... suggests that the most attractive thing to Tolstoy about such a relationship was that it took him away from sex, not towards it. But when Chertkov launched a press with the aim of distributing cheap editions of Tolstoy’s writings for a huge public, Sonya feared for the children’s inheritance. When he ...”
“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

Pinstriped Tycoon

Hal Foster: Siege Art, 5 June 2025

Art in a State of Siege 
by Joseph Leo Koerner.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, March, 978 0 691 26721 0
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“... cannot be unseen’.Certainly Schmitt couldn’t unsee it, though he turned it on its head. He took Bosch to be a painter of enmity, not love, and understood the prime enemy in The Garden to be ‘the egomaniac’, as figured in the central panel of human commingling: ‘This is nature and natural law, suspension of self-alienation and self-externalisation ...”

What the Twist Did for the Peppermint Lounge

Dave Haslam: Club culture, 6 January 2000

Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture 
by Sheryl Garratt.
Headline, 335 pp., £7.99, May 1999, 0 7472 7680 3
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Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey 
by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton.
Headline, 408 pp., £14.99, November 1999, 0 7472 7573 4
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Saturday Night For Ever: The Story of Disco 
by Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen.
Mainstream, 223 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 9781840181777
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DJ Culture 
by Ulf Poschardt.
Quartet, 473 pp., £13, January 1999, 0 7043 8098 6
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Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture 
by Simon Reynolds.
Picador, 493 pp., £12.99, July 1998, 0 330 35056 0
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More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction 
by Kodwo Eshun.
Quartet, 208 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 7043 8025 0
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“... Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen ...”

That Wooden Leg

Michael Wood: Conversations with Don Luis, 7 September 2000

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel 
translated by Garrett White.
California, 266 pp., £17.50, April 2000, 0 520 20840 4
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“... uncannily familiar figure of my old acquaintance the doctor, Buñuel’s pal José-Luis Barros. It took me a while to place the recognised face, and of course I didn’t fill in all the details even then. A few years later I met Buñuel in Mexico. He was delighted when I told him the story – he loved coincidences – and thought it would have been even ...”

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

“... targeted the kitchen first, and acquired a few ginger biscuits which were too hard to bite into. I took them upstairs and placed them under my pillow. I moved on to the other rooms, all of which had the same indifferent smell of absence. In the master bedroom, I found a jewellery box sitting on a vanity table. It was empty, but gradually, I found some treasure ...”

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

“... disincentive to illegal entry than any man-made obstacle. Border vigilance in its present form took shape in the 1990s under the first Clinton administration. In 1993 the Border Patrol in Texas reacted to large numbers of illegal crossings near El Paso with high-profile reinforcement. Operation Gatekeeper, designed to stem illegal migrant flows at San ...”

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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“... office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pietà, newly acquired by the gallery. ‘It’s buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass, so that one is obliged to take cognisance of it progressively, square inch by square inch. It’s all messed up by restorers,’ he ...”

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”

Alphabeted

Barbara Everett: Coleridge the Modernist, 7 August 2003

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection 
edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 264 pp., £17.99, June 2002, 0 19 871201 4
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1608 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00483 8
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1528 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00484 6
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works III: Plays 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1620 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 09883 2
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“... improved prisons, built libraries, decisively challenged the slave trade. But work of this order took off from a base of peculiar narrowness: a hostility to civilised manifestations of art and intellect, and a linked withdrawal from many other kinds of commitment to this world. In A Gathered Church (1978), a work that has considerable respect for Puritan ...”