Divide and divide and divide and rule

Yonatan Mendel: The Arab-Israeli Conflict, 6 October 2016

1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 
by Hillel Cohen, translated by Haim Watzman.
Brandeis, 312 pp., £20, November 2015, 978 1 61168 811 5
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... the Communist Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties, especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they ...

Oh those Lotharios

Alison Light: Jean Lucey Pratt, 17 March 2016

A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt 
edited by Simon Garfield.
Canongate, 736 pp., £12.99, April 2016, 978 1 78211 572 4
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... aimed at renouncing the ego. When she finally publishes a book (under a pseudonym), a biography of David Garrick’s mistress, the actress Peg Woffington, she worries that success may change her. But ‘nothing shattering has happened. What I expected I do not know. Did I think I would wake up famous?’ As her capital dwindles, she is preoccupied with ...

‘I’m not signing’

Mike Jay: Franco Basaglia, 8 September 2016

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care 
by John Foot.
Verso, 404 pp., £20, August 2015, 978 1 78168 926 4
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... of diagnosis had become to justify confinement and coercive treatment. The writings of Laing and David Cooper were early influences on Basaglia, though he didn’t meet Laing until 1969 when he visited Kingsley Hall. What he witnessed there was fundamentally different from what was taking place at Gorizia, operating outside the state healthcare system and ...

Gravity’s Smoothest Dream

Matthew Bevis: A.R. Ammons, 7 March 2019

The Complete Poems 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, two vols, 2133 pp., £74, December 2017, 978 0 393 25489 1
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... clarified me to myself,’ Ammons told him in 1970). Yet when Ammons assented to David Lehman’s interpretation in an interview for the Paris Review (‘I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you had been’), one senses mischief. ‘Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently ...

The Authentic Snarl

Blake Morrison: The Impudence of Tony Harrison, 30 November 2017

The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966-2016 
by Tony Harrison, edited by Edith Hall.
Faber, 544 pp., £25, April 2017, 978 0 571 32503 0
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Penguin, 464 pp., £9.99, April 2016, 978 0 241 97435 3
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... not one joy but what some berk’llWant it ringed wi’ a red circle.That could be David Hockney moaning about the nanny state – and there’s a connection of sorts (both were born into working-class Yorkshire homes in 1937), as there is with Alan Bennett (born in Leeds in 1934). Harrison’s mode is more aggrieved than Bennett’s but the ...

How bad can it be?

John Lanchester: Getting away with it, 29 July 2021

... the two older players in the leadership group, the captain, Steve Smith, and his right-hand man, David Warner, who had instructed Bancroft to ball-tamper. Smith and Warner were suspended for a year, Bancroft for nine months, and there was some question whether they would ever play for Australia again. Cricket Australia commissioned a report, which denounced ...

Which red is the real red?

Hal Foster, 2 December 2021

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror 
Whitney Museum of American Art/Philadelphia Museum of Art, until 13 February 2022Show More
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... Eva Hesse; Pop painters Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins; and the African American artists David Hammons and Glenn Ligon, who have applied stencilling to very different ends. Duchamp, Johns wrote, turned art ‘into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another’, but that lesson didn’t sink in until Johns reinforced it with his ...

The Most Corrupt Idea of Modern Times

Tom Stevenson: Inspecting the Troops, 1 July 2021

The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 
by Simon Akam.
Scribe, 704 pp., £25, March, 978 1 913348 48 9
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... by American generals who had directed major operations in Iraq. Both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus considered themselves experts in counterinsurgency – the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation. British soldiers were supposed to fall in line with American thinking and avoid making too many ...

How peculiar it is

Rosemary Hill: Gorey’s Glories, 3 June 2021

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey 
by Mark Dery.
William Collins, 512 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 00 832984 6
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... he was more robust than Mr Earbrass. His ‘meticulous’ art boards, the production editor David Hough recalled, did not need editing and suggestions were not welcome. There was he said, ‘a bit of a ruckus’ over the hyphen in The Haunted Tea-Cosy.By 1963, successive changes of job and imprint had left Gorey stranded as an unhappy employee of ...

Walkers in the Ruined City

Anthony Grafton: History in Ruins, 6 May 2021

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture 
by Susan Stewart.
Chicago, 378 pp., £23, June, 978 0 226 79220 0
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The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps 
by Jessica Maier.
Chicago, 199 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 0 226 59145 2
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... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...

Cookies, Pixels and Fingerprints

Donald MacKenzie, 1 April 2021

... kind can be like looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack, as Randall Lewis and David Reiley – two of an increasing number of economists working for tech firms – put it. There is greater confidence in ‘search ads’: the ads you are shown when you Google something of commercial interest. You are then lower in the funnel: you may be ...

Didn’t we agree to share?

Sheila Heti: ‘The First Wife’, 13 July 2017

The First Wife 
by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw.
Archipelago, 250 pp., £14.99, August 2016, 978 0 914671 48 0
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... In​ 1990, when she was 35 years old, Paulina Chiziane became the first woman in Mozambique to publish a novel. She has since published six more books, writing in Portuguese, and is one of Mozambique’s most culturally significant writers. In interviews, Chiziane has explained that she has received a lot of criticism for her books from people who think that the women’s lives she depicts aren’t deserving of attention; that the subject matter of a number of her books – women in love, as it were – is decadent, in a country where there is so much development work to be done ...

Diary

Elaine Mokhtefi: Panthers in Algiers, 1 June 2017

... that Newton overturn his expulsion edicts and called for the removal of Newton’s lieutenant David Hilliard. Newton cut short the broadcast, then called Cleaver. ‘You’re a punk,’ he said and expelled him from the BPP. Chapters and members across the US took sides.Cleaver had taped the broadcast and the phone call. He asked me to come and listen to ...

Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate

Paul Taylor: AI, 21 January 2021

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment 
by Brian Cantwell Smith.
MIT, 157 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 0 262 04304 5
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Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust 
by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.
Ballantine, 304 pp., £22.50, September 2019, 978 1 5247 4825 8
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The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect 
by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
Penguin, 418 pp., £10.99, May 2019, 978 0 14 198241 0
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... on Bayes’ Theorem, which the Reverend Bayes is said to have derived to win an argument with David Hume about the value of eyewitness testimony as evidence of miracles. The theorem tells us that the probability of a hypothesis being true, given the evidence we have in support of it, depends on two quantities. One is the quality of the evidence. The other ...

Gosh, what am I like?

Rosemary Hill: The Revenge Memoir, 17 December 2020

Friends and Enemies: A Memoir 
by Barbara Amiel.
Constable, 592 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4721 3421 9
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Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power 
by Sasha Swire.
Little, Brown, 544 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 4087 1341 9
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... she’s ‘such a Tory’. This is not a time for girly-swot politics talk. The ‘court of King David’, she observes, feels as if it is ‘actually the government’. ‘They are all here, the ones that eat, drink, party together … We all holiday together … we text each other bypassing the civil servants … it’s enough to repulse the ordinary ...