This is how you smile

Gazelle Mba: On Jamaica Kincaid, 8 February 2024

Lucy 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 144 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7688 2
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At the Bottom of the River 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 80 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7678 3
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The Autobiography of My Mother 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 208 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7675 2
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Annie John 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 160 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7712 4
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... are two Kincaids: Elaine Potter Richardson, the daughter of the domineering Annie Drew, and the self-fashioning writer, Jamaica Kincaid. In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build ...

What should the action be?

Greg Afinogenov: Anarchism’s Failure, 4 May 2023

Russian Populism: A History 
by Christopher Ely.
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., £24.99, February 2022, 978 1 350 09553 3
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Mutual Aid 
by Peter Kropotkin.
Penguin, 320 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 0 241 35533 6
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... a state-imposed exile from the centres of imperial power in St Petersburg and Moscow and then to a self-imposed flight to the West. Herzen initially found inspiration in the French Revolution, but the suffocating bourgeois capitalism that had triumphed across Europe and culminated in the failed revolution of 1848 led him to seek alternatives elsewhere. Before ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: Lucian Freud’s Printmaking, 1 June 2023

... but he saw them. Which also shows how enticing it was to sit for him. Because even though I felt self-conscious about my appearance, the very act of sitting was irresistible.’She liked the evening sessions best. They would begin with a longish stretch – fifty minutes or so – then break for tea in the kitchen and do a shorter stint before dinner. He ...

Some Beneficial Influence

Gazelle Mba: African Students in Britain, 17 April 2025

African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History 
by Hakim Adi.
Penguin, 688 pp., £18.99, September 2023, 978 1 80206 068 3
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... influences’, while at the same time rebutting claims of racial inferiority and agitating for self-government in West Africa. Respect and disdain for British society fostered a belief in national self-government, which would play out in the politics of the next generation of students. The rise of racism and national ...

What Brutal Days

Andrea Brady: On Dionne Brand, 6 March 2025

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck 
by Dionne Brand.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 217 pp., $27, October 2024, 978 0 374 61484 3
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Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems 
by Dionne Brand.
Penguin, 619 pp., £16.99, July 2023, 978 0 241 63979 5
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... subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the ‘I’ in her poems for straightforward self-expression. ‘When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency,’ she says in Salvage. ‘Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analysed, refashioned as art and made theoretical ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... Alboufaki is the mount of Carathis, Vathek’s malignant enchantress mother, and a kind of self-portrait of Beckford himself, Landry suggests, with his ‘desire for solitude, and his nose for the pestilential and the ghastly’. Beckford, she says, gives us a ‘monstrous camel as also a type of the self . . . as ...

The trouble with the Enlightenment

Mark Lilla, 6 January 1994

The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 144 pp., £14.99, October 1993, 0 7195 5312 1
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... worldly wisdom, but rather tries to employ modern philosophy against itself, proving it to be self-refuting. To mount his counter-attack Hamann relies on Hume, whose works he had discovered in London and whom he would later translate into German. (Kant eventually read Hume in this translation, thus giving Hamann an indirect role in developing the critical ...

Every Mother’s Son

Jonathan Parry: Britain in Sudan, 24 July 2025

Chain of Fire: Campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan, 1882-98 
by Peter Hart.
Profile, 444 pp., £30, February, 978 1 80081 073 0
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... the ‘true Sudan thirst’, which amounted to the ‘perpetual liquefaction and evaporation’ of self. This could be tackled only with an evening regime of comprehensive rehydration beginning with tea and ending with ‘that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed – gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda’. Once Anglo-Saxon drinkers ...

Fish in the Wrong Place

Oliver Cussen: Aquatic Colonialism, 23 October 2025

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World 
by Corey Ross.
Princeton, 447 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 21144 2
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In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 220 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 27849 1
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... against the colonial government which soon fused with broader movements for land reform and self-rule. Even the British expressed a modicum of guilt about their transformation of the Punjab. A Canal Colonies Report of 1933 lamented the replacement of the ‘goat herd’s pipe and the quavering love-song of the camel men’ with ‘the klaxon of the ...

Veni, Vidi, Video

Sean Maguire, 21 February 1991

... our way into Jordan. The check-list of forbidden photo-opportunities was well-known, and judicious self-censorship kept trouble at bay. It was much more frustrating when I wanted to film at a location I knew was uncontentious and, for reasons of pigheadedness, idleness or lunch-break, the men from the Ministry of Information refused to allow me out of the ...

Diary

John Bayley: On Retiring, 25 July 1991

... had bought and prepared the ingredients. Still the pride was something – probably a good deal. Self-respect in one’s activities is shown to be what matters. One of the female interviewees used to like the jobs she’d always had, jobs ‘where you can keep your brains for your hobbies’, cleaning schools and lavatories or checking telephone ...

Darts for art’s sake

Julian Symons, 28 September 1989

London Fields 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 470 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 224 02609 7
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... but they are awkward fictional devices, Keith’s napalm sauce is in every way a bad joke, Sam’s self-questioning about whether the Crisis will reach the Conclusion an irritant driving one to almost Keithian reactions. The book’s ending, in which not Keith but Sam proves to be the murderer, parodies the conventions of the detective story effectively (they ...

Diary

Ian Aitken: Party Fairy-Tales, 22 March 1990

... training for 28 years as a journalist in the lobbies of the Palace of Westminster. These self-indulgent memories came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a ...

Fraternisation

Eric Evans, 26 July 1990

Scottish Society 1500-1800 
edited by R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte.
Cambridge, 298 pp., £30, February 1989, 0 521 32522 6
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... Less meat and dairy produce was being consumed per capita. The new diet, however, was not self-evidently less healthy and it certainly enabled a larger population to be supported. Ian Whyte, drawing on the researches of Houston and Cage as well as his own, demonstrates how apprenticeship, kirk sessions records and marriage registers can all be used to ...

Dirty Jokes

Julian Symons, 13 September 1990

Brief Lives 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 217 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 224 02747 6
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Deception 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 208 pp., £12.95, September 1990, 0 224 03000 0
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Homeboy 
by Seth Morgan.
Chatto, 390 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7011 3664 2
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... Milton Appel who has accused him of being a ‘Jewish shit ... carrying the hereditary curse of self-hate’, and says Zuckerman’s success was the product of ‘a vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy’. ‘Carnovsky’ may be identified as Portnoy’s Complaint and other names given to Lonoff and Appel, but the point is that the ...