A Nony Mouse

Ange Mlinko: The ‘Batrachomyomachia’, 16 July 2020

‘The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice’: A Tiny Homeric Epic 
by A.E. Stallings.
Paul Dry, 109 pp., £19.99, October 2019, 978 1 58988 142 6
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by A.E. Stallings.
Farrar, Straus, 160 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 0 374 53868 2
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... the ‘inland sea’ is the Mediterranean, and it is a vessel of people – her migrant self, or Syrian refugees – that lands, or almost lands, precariously on the shelf or shoreline. This is deft work, and we can admire it as we admire a great technician, but Stallings is also making a philosophical point: the reality is that metaphor, true to ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded site is again testimony to Orbach’s determination and willingness to follow rutted, unmade, probably private roads through parched ...

Jade Goody Goes to Heaven

Laurence Scott: OK! and the uncanny, 26 March 2009

... irreparably stained by her old life, she abandons her throne for a convent, and then swoons into a self-willed, shame-ridden death. Just as the princely father noticed a purity of spirit in the girl from the city’s underbelly, we, or at least the media-makers who cater to our guilty interests, saw a brand of charm in Jade. She had the quality which most ...

Short Cuts

Amia Srinivasan: Andrea Dworkin’s Conviction, 6 October 2022

... the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, legal and social rights, self-determination, self-sovereignty’. And, what’s more:Leaving out most people also meant that the society did not use or acknowledge or respect the creativity of most people, the intelligence of most people, the life ...

At the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Crewe: Roger Fenton, 16 November 2017

... his skill at managing effects, and for the medium, then only about fifteen years old. The second self-portrait, one of the first photographs you encounter in the exhibition, is different and not. Fenton is half-seated on a table covered in a sheepskin rug and supporting a bottle of beer and a tankard; a rifle is cocked in his hands and pointed out to the ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Chicanery and Fantasy, 6 June 2019

... going to pretend to have read it all – I have a PhD in 19th-century British history, and some self-respect. It is a criminally bad book. But I doubt that my or anyone else’s saying so will make much difference to anything. Trevor-Roper was fascinated and amused by Robert Peters, but also spent a great deal of time and energy informing susceptible ...

Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0
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... in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains’.Stevens himself later wrote that ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,’ and we need slightly longer examples, perhaps, to ...

Closets of Knowledge

Frank Kermode: Privacy, 19 June 2003

Privacy: Concealing the 18th-Century Self 
by Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Chicago, 248 pp., £25.50, May 2003, 0 226 76860 0
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... private to public could be used to illustrate a point Spacks borrows from Habermas (‘individual self-contemplation prepared the way for the assumption of power’), though in the 17th century the public-private antithesis would have been expressed in terms of action and contemplation. As to the word’s second use, Milton, having described ...

Rigging and Bending

Simon Adams: James VI & I, 9 October 2003

The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 438 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7011 6984 2
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... of his achievements by his son and the Duke of Buckingham. Stewart reads it as ‘a rare hint of self-knowledge’ in which the King recognised that he remained ‘an infant, an innocent for whom the harsh realities of kingship are still unimaginable’. Stewart makes the interesting observation that ‘James was strangely aloof from many of the phenomena ...

Kill the tuna can

Christopher Tayler: George Saunders, 8 June 2006

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2006, 0 7475 8221 1
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... off to prison, having failed to dispose of an incriminating Porsche. Saunders likes parodying self-help routines and motivational speeches. He’s particularly obsessed with injecting bland menace into the word ‘super’, as in ‘“Super!” said Tom Rodgers’ or ‘Loyalty – it’s super!’ or ‘Robust Economy, Super Moral Climate!’ ‘Tonight ...

Quisling and Occupier

Virginia Tilley: The One State Solution, 3 November 2005

... the Palestinians are struggling to consolidate a genuinely representative Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority and to handle the huge economic and political challenges resulting from Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while the Sharon government finishes cantonising the West Bank, and Gaza remains walled off. Unable to achieve even the ...

Seductive Slide into Despair

Elizabeth Lowry: Monica Ali, 6 July 2006

Alentejo Blue 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 299 pp., £14.99, June 2006, 0 385 60486 6
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... are still in Mamarrosa, but the register and cast of the narrative have subtly shifted. Stanton, a self-absorbed expatriate English writer, hopelessly sidetracked by self-doubt and drink, has come to the village to write a novel about William Blake: ‘He read over the last few pages on the screen, making deletions and ...

You are terrorists, we are virtuous

Yitzhak Laor: The IDF, 17 August 2006

... dangerous, it’s just as well we went to war. The thinking becomes circular and the prophecies self-fulfilling. Israelis are fond of saying: ‘The Middle East is a jungle, where only might speaks.’ See Qana, and Gaza, or Beirut. Defenders of Israel and its leaders can always argue that the US and Britain behave similarly in Iraq. (It is true that Olmert ...

Uninfatuated

Tessa Hadley: Dan Jacobson, 20 October 2005

All for Love 
by Dan Jacobson.
Hamish Hamilton, 262 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 0 241 14273 3
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... to a story at the opposite pole of experience. Louise and Mattachich – rich, greedy, stupid, self-absorbed and casually anti-semitic as they turn out to be – are an inspired counterpoint to Jacobson’s own history: his grandfather, a rabbi in Lithuania; his parents, immigrants to South Africa in the 1920s; his upbringing in past-its-best ...

Her Proper Duties

Tessa Hadley: Helen Simpson, 5 January 2006

Constitutional 
by Helen Simpson.
Cape, 144 pp., £14.99, December 2005, 0 224 07794 5
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... in the centre of my body,’ ‘the idea had started to grow blunt, worn down by its own regular self-contemplation.’ Now that Zoe’s son is nine, the astonishing primal connection has sunk out of sight. In place of it, the two build carefully, out of their mutually considerate talk (George is a very nice boy), civilised relations. Simpson understands ...