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Australia’s Nineties

Clive James, 15 July 1982

Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography 
by Axel Clark.
Melbourne, 358 pp., £20, May 1980, 0 522 84182 1
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... teachers. Against all the odds posed by his clearly superior abilities, he contrived to get second-class honours in Classics, not so much for neglecting the books as for being contemptuous of Plato. He discovered Swinburne – at that time a writer banned from the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he ...

From the Other Side

David Drew, 18 July 1985

... had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself by the early 1920s. His friend and antagonist, exact contemporary and truest counterpart, was Ernst ...

A Great Big Silly Goose

Seamus Perry: Characteristically Spenderish, 21 May 2020

Poems Written Abroad: The Lilly Library Manuscript 
by Stephen Spender.
Indiana, 112 pp., £27.99, July 2019, 978 0 253 04167 8
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... death close linkedHad paced the enormous cloud, almost had won            War on the sun;Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,            Hands, wings, are found.The prosaic detail behind this was that ‘Marston’ was in the University Flying Club; but Spender conjures him into a zooming superhero, a doomed Lawrentian ...

Gorilla with Mobile Phone

Theo Tait: Michel Houellebecq, 9 February 2006

Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène 
by Denis Demonpion.
Maren Sell, 377 pp., €20, August 2005, 2 35004 022 4
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The Possibility of an Island 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd.
Weidenfeld, 345 pp., £12.99, November 2005, 0 297 85098 9
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... and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. He lived there until 1961, when, with the Algerian war of independence nearing its end, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Henriette, in the Yonne, south-east of Paris. By this time, his parents had divorced. Michel only saw them during the holidays. ‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a ...

The way out of a room is not through the door

Christian Lorentzen: Charles Manson, 7 November 2013

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson 
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon and Schuster, 495 pp., £20, August 2013, 978 0 85720 893 4
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... away, she followed. A recruitment phase began. The women were mostly from broken down middle-class families. Manson told them they were beautiful and nothing was their fault. The message was to do away with guilt and shame, with the ego, with worldly possessions, with the hang-ups of the outside world. He would fill the void. He started saying he was the ...

Desire Was Everywhere

Adam Shatz, 16 December 2010

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives 
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman.
Columbia, 651 pp., £26, August 2010, 978 0 231 14560 2
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... two most personal books, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which he declared war on Platonic philosophy. Yet these books only hinted at the radicalism of his intentions.Deleuze and Guattari had an instant intellectual rapport. Both men were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... Home’, he provides this portrait of his father late in life: My father, who had flown in World War I, Might have continued to invest his life In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife. But the race was run below, and the point was to win. Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze (Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six) The soul eclipsed by ...

Ave, Jeeves!

Emily Wilson: Rom(an) Com, 21 February 2008

Plautine Elements in Plautus 
by Eduard Fraenkel, translated by Tomas Drevikovsky and Frances Muecke.
Oxford, 459 pp., £79, November 2006, 0 19 924910 5
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Plautus: ‘Asinaria – The One about the Asses’ 
translated by John Henderson.
Wisconsin, 252 pp., £13.50, December 2006, 0 299 21994 1
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Terence: The Comedies 
translated by Peter Brown.
Oxford, 338 pp., £9.99, January 2008, 978 0 19 282399 1
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Terence: Comedies 
translated by Frederick Clayton.
Exeter, 290 pp., £45, January 2006, 0 85989 757 5
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... were actors. It has been estimated that in the decades following the third and final Punic War, when Rome won its decisive victory over Carthage (146 BC), some 30 or 40 per cent of the population of Italy were slaves. Many slaves were literate, some of them very highly educated. Cicero’s beloved secretary, Tiro, inventor of the first known system of ...

Black and White Life

Mark Greif: Ralph Ellison, 1 November 2007

Ralph Ellison: A Biography 
by Arnold Rampersad.
Knopf, 657 pp., $35, April 2007, 978 0 375 40827 4
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... American canon. In 1965 Invisible Man was chosen as the most distinguished novel since World War Two by a collection of ‘200 prominent authors, critics and editors’ for Book Week magazine. In 1978, when Wilson Quarterly canvassed professors of American literature on the most important novels published in the United States since World ...

Bouncebackability

David Runciman: Athenian Democracy and Google, 29 January 2009

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens 
by Josiah Ober.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.95, November 2008, 978 0 691 13347 8
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... oratory, drama, magnificent buildings – but it was also a violent, faction-ridden, capricious, war-mongering, slave-owning society, clinging precariously to its privileged position, and regularly picking fights it couldn’t win. It doesn’t exactly sound like the Google (company motto: ‘Don’t be evil’) of the ancient world. However, Josiah Ober is ...

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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... on the struggle against Fascism – in Spain and then, with the rise of Nazism and the onset of war, throughout most of Europe. After the war the AIA divided, basically between pro and anti-Soviet wings, or, in more general terms, between an increasingly politicised and an increasingly depoliticised wing. Berger, at that ...

Aloha, aloha

Ian Hacking, 7 September 1995

What ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 316 pp., £19.95, July 1995, 0 226 73368 8
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... parts, a point essential to Sahlins’s analysis. During one month there is a period of renewal, war is forbidden, and affairs are largely in the charge of priests who honour the mythical return of a god and ex-king Lono. Then, they make love, not war. For the other 11 months, however, ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... that the one can fill in the gaps of the other, encouraging the dangerous myth that Alexander’s war with Darius somehow prefigures early modern encounters of Europeans with the New World, as if the Macedonians were discovering the Persia they had actually grown up with. Then again, the fact-finding mentality separates style from substance. With his ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... of them has been reprinted.) ‘It’ was going to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should be’. According to his biographer ...

Falklands Title Deeds

Malcolm Deas, 19 August 1982

The Struggle for the Falkland Islands 
by Julius Goebel, introduced by J.C.J. Metford.
Yale, 482 pp., £10, June 1982, 0 300 02943 8
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The Falklands Islands Dispute: International Dimensions 
edited by Joan Pearce.
Chatham House, 47 pp., £2.75, April 1982, 0 905031 25 3
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The Falkland Islands: The Facts 
HMSO, 12 pp., £50, May 1982, 0 11 701029 4Show More
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... of Argentina: he thinks it is an ‘agrarian feudalistic society’ with a ‘small urban middle class’. Dr Goebel, he speculates, was an anti-colonialist from the ‘vociferous’ Yale Law School, which gave him the ‘subconscious motive’ for writing on this subject. Perhaps, but the single-minded grind looks more like the eternal PhD student to ...

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