The End of Labour?

Colin Kidd, 8 March 2012

... was referred to the party’s Scottish Council Executive, which met on Saturday, 22 June 1974, the day Scotland’s football team played Yugoslavia in a televised World Cup game. Although the meeting was quorate, only 11 members of the Council Executive – there were more than thirty – turned up, and voted by six to five to reject a devolution ...

My word, Miss Perkins

Jenny Diski: In the Typing Pool, 4 August 2005

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture 
edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell.
Ashgate, 168 pp., £40, January 2005, 0 7546 3804 9
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... jokes about the boss telling his wife: ‘I’ve had a terrible time, dear, I had to spend the day working with the typewriter on my knees.’ I imagine some similar jest might be devised for the laptop computer, but I can’t be bothered. Roland Barthes anguished over the problem of the literary division of labour before word processors arrived and solved ...

The Wives of Herr Bear

Julia Briggs: Jane Harrison, 21 September 2000

The Invention of Jane Harrison 
by Mary Beard.
Harvard, 229 pp., £23.50, July 2000, 0 674 00212 1
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... quality in Harrison’s rhetoric? Should we explain it in terms of the prevailing discourse of the day, which she was obliged to adopt in order to be heard at all, or should we agree with Tina Passman that ‘Jane Harrison wrote like a dyke and lived like a dyke’? Beard steps carefully around the issues of desire and passion; she prefers to address the ...

O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman: George Barker, 3 October 2002

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker 
by Robert Fraser.
Cape, 573 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 224 06242 5
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... had been a watershed for Barker, as he recalled: ‘my childhood came to an end on that day in nineteen hundred and heaven knows what when I spent my lunch money on a poem which seemed to me so great that for two or three days afterwards my own poems disappointed me.’ Eliot, for his part, seemed to respond readily to the strains of an antique ...

At the Palazzo Venier

Nicholas Penny: Peggy Guggenheim’s Eye, 9 May 2002

Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict 
by Anton Gill.
HarperCollins, 506 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 00 257078 5
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... Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred Barr, in the preface to her autobiography, claims that she had ‘loved and studied Italian Renaissance painting, particularly that of ...

That Damn Smooth Stuff

Jefferson Cowie: Louisiana Demagogue, 19 March 2026

American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana 
by Thomas E. Patterson.
Louisiana State, 704 pp., £43, February 2025, 978 0 8071 8299 4
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... to the left, demanding increases in income and inheritance taxes, a shortening of the working day, federal control of farm surpluses, and currency inflation that would reduce the burdens on indebted farmers. He ripped into fake corporate concern for the people, asking a manufacturers’ association, ‘Why didn’t all you lovin’, kindly ...

Thunderstruck

Arthur Gavshon, 6 June 1985

The Falklands War: Lessons for Strategy, Diplomacy and International Law 
edited by Alberto Coll and Anthony Arend.
Allen and Unwin, 252 pp., £18, May 1985, 0 04 327075 1
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... territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters since dawn (11 hours earlier). The attack, which took 368 Argentine lives, proved to be the pivotal event of the war: until that time no Briton had been killed. Furthermore, efforts were ...

Out Hunting

Gary Younge: In Baltimore, 29 July 2021

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City 
by Justin Fenton.
Faber, 335 pp., £14.99, February, 978 0 571 35661 4
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... resources with them. In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described five ‘distinct dimensions’ by which segregation might be measured: unevenness, which is the degree to which African Americans are over-represented in specific areas; exposure, the level of contact, or lack of ...

Play for Today

Adam Smyth: Rewriting ‘Pericles’, 24 October 2019

Spring 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 20704 8
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The Porpoise 
by Mark Haddon.
Chatto, 309 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 1 78474 282 9
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... temple at Ephesus.’ The brothel scenes were heavily pruned: this was a Pericles, in the words of Douglas Jerrold in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, ‘disinfected of its impurities in a manner that would win the praise of the most fastidious member of the most moral Board of Health that ever held its sittings within the camphored precincts of Exeter ...

Ismism

Evan Kindley: Modernist Magazines, 23 January 2014

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 976 pp., £35, May 2013, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960 
edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.
Oxford, 1088 pp., £140, July 2012, 978 0 19 965429 1
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The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880-1940 
edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop.
Oxford, 1471690 pp., £145, March 2013, 978 0 19 965958 6
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... market’ or ‘the nation’ can be unwieldy, and often carry scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in ...

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... After a bumpy start at Deerfield (‘I wish I was home,’ he wrote in his diary after his fourth day), he found his way to the school’s art studio and settled right in. The academic work initially overwhelmed him, and he detested the daily and compulsory sports practices. Rumours began circulating that he was homosexual and he was persecuted for it. The ...

A Cine-Fist to the Solar Plexus

David Trotter: Eisenstein, 2 August 2018

Beyond the Stars, Vol.1: The Boy from Riga 
by Sergei Eisenstein, translated by William Powell.
Seagull, 558 pp., £16.99, June 2018, 978 0 85742 488 4
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On the Detective Story 
by Sergei Eisenstein, translated by Alan Upchurch.
Seagull, 229 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 0 85742 490 7
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On Disney 
by Sergei Eisenstein, translated by Alan Upchurch.
Seagull, 208 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 0 85742 491 4
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The Short-Fiction Scenario 
by Sergei Eisenstein, translated by Alan Upchurch.
Seagull, 115 pp., £16.99, November 2017, 978 0 85742 489 1
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Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis 
by Luka Arsenjuk.
Minnesota, 249 pp., £19.99, February 2018, 978 1 5179 0320 6
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... became a ‘celebrity’: a boutique director as fervently admired by Hollywood royalty – Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin – as he was in the European salons and cine-clubs. October (1928), which begins with the abdication of Nicolas II and concludes with the storming of the Winter Palace, followed; and then The General Line ...

Wigging In

Matthew Bevis: On James Schuyler, 23 April 2026

A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 
by Nathan Kernan.
FSG, 503 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 374 28117 5
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... you’ve opted in. What has Schuyler made of his life? He’s made this.In his absorbing Life, A Day like Any Other, Nathan Kernan begins by noting that this isn’t a critical biography, before adding that, after the details have been absorbed, he would like the reader to remember the caveat Schuyler offers in ‘Hymn to Life’ about the taxonomy of his ...

Daisy Chains

Emma Hogan: Sappho 1900, 20 May 2021

No Modernism without Lesbians 
by Diana Souhami.
Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4
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... Cassatt (who she hoped would be her partner in a ‘chaste and intellectual marriage’). The next day, wearing a hired prince costume embroidered with pearls, and carrying roses and cornflowers, Barney called on de Pougy. (She usually rejected more mannish clothes – ‘why try to resemble our enemies’ – but they could be useful when trying to seduce ...

You Have Never Written Better

Benjamin Markovits: Byron’s Editor, 20 March 2008

The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron 
edited by Andrew Nicholson.
Liverpool, 576 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 1 84631 069 0
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... awoken one morning etc, we might not have had The Corsair (which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication), The Bride of Abydos, Lara, and the rest of the Eastern tales that followed. The lionisation, the affair with Lady Caroline Lamb that succeeded it, and the affair with his half-sister which succeeded that, the marriage, the separation, the ...