Lemon and Pink

David Trotter: The Sorrows of Young Ford, 1 June 2000

Return to Yesterday 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Bill Hutchings.
Carcanet, 330 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 397 1
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War Prose 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Max Saunders.
Carcanet, 276 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 396 3
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... peas and grapes, while the specialists proposed a sexual origin for his troubles, and he lost weight dramatically. ‘Brain-Fag’ was about the best they could do by way of diagnosis, and perhaps they were right. Autobiography’s main function in this picture of a sort of world and time is as an interference. It preserves the memoir from literary ...

A Most Delicate Invention

Tim Parks: ‘Money and Beauty’, 22 September 2011

... cost you around £110. This was a coin for serious trade, and the Florentines made sure that its weight and purity remained absolutely unchanged for the almost three hundred years it was minted, keeping meticulous records of alterations in design and instituting a system of quality control that saw each superintendent serving only six months in order to ...

Empathy

Robin Holloway: Donald Francis Tovey, 8 August 2002

The Classics of Music: Talks, Essays and Other Writings Previously Uncollected 
by Donald Francis Tovey, edited by Michael Tilmouth.
Oxford, 821 pp., £60, September 2001, 0 19 816214 6
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... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...

Backlash Blues

John Lahr, 16 June 2016

What Happened, Miss Simone? A Biography 
by Alan Light.
Canongate, 309 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 1 78211 871 8
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... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...

I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... whether CIA agents were above the law – ‘the king’s personal staff’, as the CIA director Richard Helms called them – or, like all other Americans, subject to the constitution. In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms – “who will rid me of this ...

Deciding Derrida

David Hoy, 18 February 1982

... denied, although there has been relatively little written on him by English-speaking philosophers (Richard Rorty being a notable exception). Many may think the peak of Derrida’s influence is past, but Hartman is still justified in saying that Derrida will not be forgotten, if only because he will not be forgiven.Exactly what is so unforgettable is difficult ...

We need a better plan

Alexander Bevilacqua: Dinosaurs on the Ark, 5 March 2026

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought 
by Philip C. Almond.
Cambridge, 396 pp., £35, April 2025, 978 1 009 55722 1
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... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...

Little and Large

David Trotter: Lydia Davis’s Method, 5 March 2026

Into the Weeds 
by Lydia Davis.
Yale, 139 pp., £12.99, January, 978 0 300 27974 0
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... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...

He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita

Amia Srinivasan: How Should I Refer to You?, 2 July 2020

What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She 
by Dennis Baron.
Liveright, 304 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 63149 604 2
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... as was only appropriate for ‘this age of improvement’. In 1868 the popular language columnist Richard White rejected a reader’s suggestion of en, from French (surprisingly not the more apt on), the virtues of which the reader had illustrated with the sentence ‘If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn’t eat cheese for supper.’ White, who favoured the ...
Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction 
by Philip Fisher.
Harvard, 290 pp., £18.50, May 1999, 0 674 83859 9
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... Fukuyama has arrived at a similar conclusion, and among fictional characters, the heroine of Richard Condon’s novel The Final Addiction. Like them, Fisher insists that the ingenuity of global capitalism now flows into all the interstices of out lives, and that, with its sublime new products, it will revolutionise all our former assumptions. He declares ...

The spirit in which things are said

Arnold Davidson, 20 December 1984

Themes out of School: Causes and Effects 
by Stanley Cavell.
Scolar/North Point, 288 pp., £16.95, January 1985, 0 86547 146 0
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... one which has its own special rigour, in which the accuracy of description bears an enormous weight. In aiming to transform a sensibility, one must capture it precisely, and if one’s descriptions are too coarse, too rough or too smooth, they will hold no direct interest, seeming to have missed the mark completely. Cavell’s writing places ...

Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 
by Patrick Collinson.
Oxford, 297 pp., £17.50, January 1983, 0 19 822685 3
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Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 
by John Morrill.
Macmillan, 257 pp., £14, November 1982, 0 333 27565 9
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The World of the Muggletonians 
by Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont.
Temple Smith, 195 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 0 85117 226 1
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The Life of John Milton 
by A.N. Wilson.
Oxford, 278 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 211776 9
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Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 8: 1666-1682 
edited by Maurice Kelley.
Yale, 625 pp., £55, January 1983, 0 300 02561 0
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The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Works of Andrew Marvell 
by Warren Chernaik.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 9780521247733
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... of its authors, who understand that provincial sentiment cannot explain everything. One of them, Richard Tuck, explores a subject which it could not explain, the hitherto perplexing decision of the great lawyer John Selden to support Parliament in the Civil War. A historian of political science, Tuck does not consider, as his fellow contributors ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging comments, and she in turn, praising his ...

Shoe-Contemplative

David Bromwich: Hazlitt, 18 June 1998

The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 382 pp., £22.50, June 1998, 0 571 17421 3
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... and resolution; the left arm outstretched for guidance, while the right carries the substantial weight of a hunter’s bow; the grave impression of the tread of a giant, his feet planted with the shortened stride of a man uncertain what spot of ground he is poised to touch upon. The shadows to the left and right foreground are also part of the ...

I am the fifth dimension!

Bee Wilson, 27 July 2017

Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra Special Talking Mongoose 
by Christopher Josiffe.
Strange Attractor, 404 pp., £15.99, April 2017, 978 1 907222 48 1
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... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the ...