Nudged

Jamie Martin: Nudge Theory, 27 July 2017

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World 
by Michael Lewis.
Allen Lane, 362 pp., £25, December 2016, 978 0 241 25473 8
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... been the military governor of the West Bank city of Jericho. In the late 1970s, as their careers took off, both men left Israel for North America – Kahneman went to the University of British Columbia and Tversky to Stanford. Tversky was the first to become famous for the work they’d done together, and the tensions caused by this damaged their ...

We want our Mars Bars!

Will Frears: Arsène Who?, 7 January 2021

My Life in Red and White 
by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4746 1824 3
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... ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the ...

Lancelot v. Galahad

Benjamin Markovits: Basketball Narratives, 21 July 2022

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks 
by Chris Herring.
Atria, 368 pp., £23.95, January, 978 1 9821 3211 8
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... 1954) but on its ability to tell complex stories – its contributors included William Faulkner, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Don DeLillo. In Blood in the Garden, Herring is firmly in narrative mode, and he wants to remind us what a good narrative sport basketball is.This is true for several reasons, some more interesting than others. First, the obvious ...

Evil Days

V.G. Kiernan, 10 May 1990

Luther: Man between God and the Devil 
by Heiko Oberman, translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart.
Yale, 380 pp., £18.95, March 1990, 0 300 03794 5
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... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...

Baring his teeth

Peter Clarke, 25 June 1992

The Macmillans: The Story of a Dynasty 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Heinemann, 370 pp., £18.50, April 1992, 0 434 17502 1
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... here, in more senses than one, that the author’s problems begin. The Macmillan family apparently took against the book that he was writing and has withheld or withdrawn permission for him to quote from copyright material over which it has control. The present Earl of Stockton is quoted as calling the author’s technique ‘psycho-history’, which ...

Founding Moments

Stuart Macintyre, 11 March 1993

The Oxford History of Australia. Vol. II, 1770-1860: Possessions 
by Jan Kociumbas.
Oxford, 397 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 19 554610 5
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The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales 
by David Neal.
Cambridge, 266 pp., £30, March 1992, 9780521372640
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Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales 
by Roger Milliss.
McPhee Gribble, 965 pp., February 1992, 0 86914 156 2
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Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language 
by Paul Carter.
Faber, 214 pp., £14.99, July 1992, 0 571 16329 7
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... discontent back into a wide-ranging critique of the received version of the past. Initially this took the form of a patricidal assault on the radical nationalists who were arraigned for their mythologisation of the convicts as defiant victims, the bushrangers as primitive rebels and goldfield diggers as levelling democrats. The re-evaluation widened as ...

Beyond the ‘New History’

Theodore Zeldin, 16 March 1989

The Identity of France. Vol I: History and Environment 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 432 pp., £20, December 1988, 0 00 217773 0
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... prestige rested. No wonder he was looked on as a threat to vested interests by his colleagues. It took a long time for the French to be impressed by his masterpiece on the Mediterranean. He published it at his own expense; it remained out of print for many years. Only when an English translation appeared, and was greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the ...

Acapulcalypse

Patrick Parrinder, 23 November 1989

Christopher Unborn 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alfred MacAdam.
Deutsch, 531 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 233 98016 4
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The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories 
edited by Nick Caistor.
Faber, 188 pp., £11.99, September 1989, 0 571 15359 3
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Hollywood 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 543 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 9780233984957
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Oldest living Confederate widow tells all 
by Allan Gurganus.
Faber, 718 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571142019
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... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician appears in the middle distance – we ...

Is anyone listening?

Christopher Husbands, 16 February 1989

Racial Consciousness 
by Michael Banton.
Longman, 153 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 582 02385 8
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Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots 
by Edward Pilkington.
Tauris, 182 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 1 85043 113 2
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Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today 
by Keith Tompson.
Penguin, 204 pp., £3.99, September 1988, 9780140523911
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A Pakistani Community in Britain 
by Alison Shaw.
Blackwell, 187 pp., £19.50, August 1988, 0 631 15228 8
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Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain 
by Ferdinand Dennis.
Gollancz, 216 pp., £12.95, August 1988, 9780575040984
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Black Youth, Racism and the State: The Politics of Ideology and Policy 
by John Solomos.
Cambridge, 284 pp., £27.50, October 1988, 0 521 36019 6
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Integration or Disintegration? Towards a Non-Racist Society 
by Ray Honeyford.
Claridge, 309 pp., £15.95, November 1988, 9781870626804
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... changing rapidly and competition for housing was intense, serious inter-racial hostility mainly took the form of what Pilkington calls the ‘white riot’. The same thing is referred to in some of the relevant American literature as a ‘communal’ or ‘contested-area riot’ – the Chicago riot of 1919 offers one of the most spectacular ...

Elizabeth’s Chamber

Frank Kermode, 9 May 1991

The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism 
by John Barrell.
Yale, 235 pp., £18.95, May 1991, 0 300 04932 3
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... Hillis Miller, in his book, The Disappearance of God, which was published in 1963, before Miller took his deconstructionist turn. The critical avant-garde was at that moment phenomenological, in the manner of Gaston Poulet; the critical project was to map the configurations and repetitions of an entire oeuvre, including marginal materials, journal entries ...

Wrong Trowsers

E.S. Turner, 21 July 1994

A History of Men’s Fashion 
by Farid Chenoune, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Flammarion/Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., £50, October 1993, 2 08 013536 8
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The Englishman’s Suit 
by Hardy Amies.
Quartet, 116 pp., £12, June 1994, 9780704370760
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... names of bogus universities, jokes and obscenities. The author mentions the way in which designers took to applying their labels all over their garments, like graffiti gangs registering their ‘tags’, but does not speculate on why the human race has felt irresistibly drawn to providing such a miscellany of reading-matter on chest and back. Is it part of the ...

The man who missed his life

Michael Wood, 10 February 1994

The Age of Innocence 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
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The Age of Innocence 
by Edith Wharton, introduced by Peter Washington.
Everyman, 308 pp., £9.99, September 1993, 1 85715 202 6
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... without aeroplanes or electricity, to a time and a place where a trip across the Atlantic that took only five days was a projector’s fantasy. Do we regret or celebrate their passing? Do we applaud or bewail the new speed and laxity? Which is the age of innocence, then or now? The movie doesn’t attend to the passage of time in this way – it leaves ...

Diary

Robert Morley: Give me a Basher to travel, 20 March 1986

... resourceful magpie of a ship-owner who disposed of his fleet at the outbreak of World War One and took to collecting everything from Chinese pottery through armour to French Impressionists. There were reproductions of his library, dining-room and lounge. ‘Lounge’ is perhaps not quite the right word: upright uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep ...

Eric’s Hurt

David Craig, 7 March 1985

Eric Linklater: A Critical Biography 
by Michael Parnell.
Murray, 376 pp., £16, October 1984, 0 7195 4109 3
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... novel had been wholly dire in their presentation of warfare since the Napoleonic Wars. Linklater took a middling position. In one of his autobiographies, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), he wrote regarding his own Private Angelo: ‘War, in Italy, was a drunken, destructive and impertinent clown; to deal justly and truthfully with it, one had to keep one’s ...

The Art of Self-Defeat

Noël Annan, 19 July 1984

Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee 
by Jessica Mitford.
Heinemann, 175 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 0 434 46802 9
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... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...