One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the camps in which the children are described as ...

Trying to Make Decolonisation Look Good

Bernard Porter: The End of Empire, 2 August 2007

Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-68 
by Ronald Hyam.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £17.99, February 2007, 978 0 521 68555 9
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The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire 
by Peter Clarke.
Allen Lane, 559 pp., August 2007, 978 0 7139 9830 6
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Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire 
by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper.
Allen Lane, 673 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 7139 9782 8
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... long. It was here that the traditions going back at least as far as Macaulay of devolution to ‘white’ colonies, and ‘trusteeship’ in the others – the latter a genuine strain in British colonial policy, if sometimes a rather tenuous one – came in useful. But they also presented a problem. If Britain had been planning for this all along – if her ...

The Mouth of Calamities

Musab Younis: Césaire’s Reversals, 5 December 2024

Return to My Native Land 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock.
Penguin, 65 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 53539 4
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. . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by Alex Gil.
Duke, 298 pp., £22.99, August 2024, 978 1 4780 3064 5
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Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits 
by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Oxford, 160 pp., £70, February 2024, 978 0 19 286722 3
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... had made the island their home (the French Ministry of Culture’s website still claims that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered the island’); the suppression and expulsion of the island’s Indigenous population in the 17th century; the transfer of enslaved people from Africa to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations; the abolition of slavery in ...

Military to Military

Seymour M. Hersh, 7 January 2016

... in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence. On 11 September 2012 the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed during an anti-American demonstration that led to the burning down of the US consulate in Benghazi; reporters for the Washington Post found copies of the ambassador’s schedule in the building’s ruins. It showed that on 10 ...

Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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... rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars – for the first time – blinding red & white stars exploding in the black void of snarls & bitings. Air cleared. We are intact. She goes on to describe a walk she took with Ted later in the day: The evening was dim, light grey with wet humid mist, swimming green. I took a pair of silver-plated ...

In the Gaudy Supermarket

Terry Eagleton: Gayatri Spivak, 13 May 1999

A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present 
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Harvard, 448 pp., £30.95, June 1999, 0 674 17763 0
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... from Jane Eyre to the Asiatic Mode of Production challenges the staider compositional notions of white male scholars, it also has more than a smack of good old American eclecticism about it. In this gaudy, all-licensed supermarket of the mind, any idea can apparently be permutated with any other. What some might call dialectical thinking is for others a ...

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3
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... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true ...

Who’s the real wolf?

Kevin Okoth: Black Marseille, 23 September 2021

Romance in Marseille 
by Claude McKay.
Penguin, 208 pp., £12.99, May 2020, 978 0 14 313422 0
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... rich material would inevitably make its way into his fiction. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Jean-Christopher Cloutier unexpectedly came across another novel that had been buried in the archives. Amiable with Big Teeth was written in 1941 but has only now been published for the first time, with an introduction by Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards.* It was the ...

Pure Mediterranean

Malcolm Bull: Picasso and Nietzsche, 20 February 2014

Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica 
by T.J. Clark.
Princeton, 352 pp., £29.95, May 2013, 978 0 691 15741 2
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... which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding on to the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a colour – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is ...

Paisley’s Progress

Tom Paulin, 1 April 1982

... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...

Davie’s Rap

Neil Corcoran, 25 January 1990

Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 261 pp., £18.95, October 1989, 0 85635 820 7
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Annunciations 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 55 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 19 282680 8
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Possible Worlds 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 68 pp., £6.95, September 1989, 0 19 282660 3
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The boys who stole the funeral: A Novel Sequence 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 71 pp., £6.95, October 1989, 0 85635 845 2
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... topographical sweep make the poem seem almost like a fragmented and extremely compacted Patrick White novel; and it is not always easy to follow. It is technically inventive, a quasi-cinematic exercise in sudden cross-cutting and the talented mimicry of a wide range of Australian voices and accents: but I find the rise and swell of Murray’s free verse in ...
The New Select Committees: A Study of the 1979 Reforms 
edited by Gavin Drewry.
Oxford, 410 pp., £25, September 1985, 9780198227854
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Commons Select Committees: Catalysts for Progress? 
edited by Dermot Englefield.
Longman, 288 pp., £15, May 1984, 0 582 90260 6
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British Government and the Constitution: Text, Cases and Materials 
by Colin Turpin.
Weidenfeld, 476 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 297 78651 2
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Parliament in the 1980s 
edited by Philip Norton.
Blackwell, 208 pp., £19.50, July 1985, 0 631 14056 5
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... law, the reversal of government policy on the privatisation of Heavy Goods Vehicle testing and the White Fish Authority levy. The Foreign Affairs Committee report on the repatriation of the Canadian constitution is widely reckoned to have influenced the smooth passage of the ensuing legislation. But such instances are exceptions rather than the norm and have ...

The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

The Orton Diaries 
edited by John Lahr.
Methuen, 307 pp., £12.50, November 1986, 0 413 49660 0
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... there, or discussed his feelings. Orton concludes: ‘the sleeve of my rainmac is covered with white-wash from the wall. It won’t come off.’ All emotion, all sensation, is edited out. But the scene is there – horribly vivid, carefully written. Because Orton’s prose is naturally flat and economical, the pose is perfunctory. Was Orton ...