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What did happen?

David Edgar: Ukraine, 21 January 2016

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £25, December 2015, 978 0 241 18808 8
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In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine 
by Tim Judah.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, January 2016, 978 0 241 19882 7
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Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West 
by Andrew Wilson.
Yale, 236 pp., £12.99, October 2014, 978 0 300 21159 7
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Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands 
by Richard Sakwa.
I.B. Tauris, 297 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78453 527 8
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... went ape.’ This view is challenged in the other immediate response to the 2013-14 events, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine. Sakwa has reservations about the 2004 Orange Revolution; the question of whether it was a people’s revolution or a revolutionary coup ‘remains pertinent to this day’. The Maidan uprising began as a protest against the ...

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Andrew O’Hagan: If something happens to me…, 5 May 2005

... cemetery in the small town of Stevenson. Mrs Wallace’s spot was up against the right-hand wall, deep in the shadow of the Ardeer Explosives Factory. Of course, something has since happened to the factory and its cooling towers too, but I remember their real presence in that Stevenson graveyard. In a tangle of crosses and angels it said on the ...

In the Sorting Office

James Meek, 28 April 2011

... crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of her own archival heaps of newspapers and magazines. Should these two ...

Don’t tread on me

Galen Strawson, 6 October 1994

Humiliation and Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort and Violence 
by William Ian Miller.
Cornell, 270 pp., £20.95, December 1993, 0 8014 2881 5
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... say, to feeling angry, hurt or silly. Is this impossible? Miller is ambivalent. He reports Richard Rorty’s view that there is, in spite of all the supposedly unfathomable differences between cultures, at least one social-psychological universal: ‘the humiliatability of human kind’. At the same time, he writes of those who are ...

Digging up the Ancestors

R.W. Johnson, 14 November 1996

Hugh Gaitskell 
by Brian Brivati.
Cohen, 492 pp., £25, September 1996, 1 86066 073 8
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... party who was born to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the ...

Late Picasso at the Tate

David Sylvester, 1 September 1988

... Indeed, it seems to me that at the Tate many of the late paintings look as if they are Medieval wall-paintings. Since everything they are contradicts the aesthetics of the easel-painting tradition, to say that they look like frescos here is to say that here they come into their own. That consummation, by the way, has nothing to impede it when they are ...

How to Kowtow

D.J. Enright: The thoughts of China, 29 July 1999

The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds 
by Jonathan Spence.
Penguin, 279 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7139 9313 8
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... we are back with the daily papers. One bright interlude, ‘a curious reprise to the past’, is Richard Nixon’s consultation with Malraux before the President’s departure for China in 1972 (a voyage of discovery code-named ‘Polo II’). ‘Mr President,’ Malraux declared, ‘you operate within a rational framework, but Mao does not. There is ...

Utopian about the Present

Christopher Turner: The Brutalist Ethic, 4 July 2019

Alison and Peter Smithson 
by Mark Crinson.
Historic England, 150 pp., £30, June 2018, 978 1 84802 352 9
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Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing 
by John Boughton.
Verso, 330 pp., £9.99, April 2019, 978 1 78478 740 0
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... an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’. The perimeter of the estate was marked by a high wall designed to bounce back traffic noise, and to allow for oblique views through it, but which made the site seem heavily fortified. Garages were sunk into a ‘moat’, giving the building the appearance of a medieval keep, a besieged island successfully ...

The Chill of Disillusion

T.J. Clark: Leonardo da Vinci, 5 January 2012

Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan 
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... it is as if Shakespeare at the time of The Tempest had been forced by an old contract to rewrite Richard III.) One way out of this quandary – for it does not feel right to historians that the golden years of the High Renaissance should leave behind such a central, equivocal instance of ‘progress’ – has been to doubt that what we see in London is ...

War Therapy

Chase Madar: Victors’ Justice, 22 April 2010

Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad 
by Danilo Zolo, translated by M.W. Weir.
Verso, 189 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 84467 317 9
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... Philippe Sands, a prominent proponent of this view, claims that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the liberal Anglo-American vision of a rules-based international system appeared to be becoming a reality.’ True, there had been some backsliding in the Clinton years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the ...

Lacan’s Ghost

Wendy Doniger: The mirror, 3 January 2002

The Mirror: A History 
by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, translated by Katharine Jewett.
Routledge, 308 pp., £16.99, January 2001, 0 415 92447 2
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... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...

I am a cactus

John Sutherland: Christopher Isherwood and his boys, 3 June 2004

Isherwood 
by Peter Parker.
Picador, 914 pp., £25, May 2004, 0 330 48699 3
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... whom he had few nice things to say, and his impressionable, mentally unstable younger brother, Richard, about whom Parker has turned up new material – much of which also makes one think badly of Isherwood. With his family disowned, he formed what would be his longest – and wholly asexual – friendship at Repton, with Edward Upward. Close and ...

Reasons for Corbyn

William Davies, 13 July 2017

... producing a more diffuse cultural logic. This is manifest in the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, where the ‘big data’ mentality of capturing every biographical detail over time is elevated to an artform. This cultural epoch introduces a distinct set of problems. Which event from the past will pop up next? How can a ...

But I wanted a crocodile

Thomas Meaney: Castro in Harlem, 4 February 2021

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s 
by Simon Hall.
Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020, 978 0 571 35306 4
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... critics of America, who figure that they are unlikely to be assassinated in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller Centre. In 2006, Hugo Chávez delivered free heating oil to the South Bronx and ostentatiously paid off the debts of Hispanic NGOs in the city. For Castro in the 1960s, Harlem was a useful place to expose American injustice. He made a ...

Your hat sucks

Gill Partington: UbuWeb, 1 April 2021

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics and Poetics of UbuWeb 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 328 pp., £20, July 2020, 978 0 231 18695 7
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... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...

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