The Great Neurotic Art

Steven Shapin: Tucking into Atkins, 5 August 2004

Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution: The No-Hunger, Luxurious Weight Loss Plan that Really Works! 
by Robert C. Atkins.
Vermilion, 542 pp., £7.99, January 2003, 0 09 188948 0
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Atkins for Life: The Next Level, Permanent Weight Loss and Good Health 
by Robert C. Atkins.
Pan, 456 pp., £7.99, December 2003, 0 330 41846 7
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The South Beach Diet: The Delicious, Doctor-Designed Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss 
by Arthur Agatston.
Headline, 278 pp., £10.99, May 2003, 0 7553 1129 9
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... toxic tort suit against ‘Big Sugar’ but ‘Marge’s Law’ is soon subverted. When Homer himself becomes a sugar bootlegger, Marge realises she can’t win against the dark forces of carb-addiction and gives up. The metabolic science that is said to underpin the addiction story, and that justifies Atkins’s regime, is by now reasonably ...

Back from the Underworld

Marina Warner: The Liveliness of the Dead, 17 August 2017

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Princeton, 711 pp., £27.95, October 2015, 978 0 691 15778 8
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... memorials try to include everyone, victims and perpetrators, from all sides of the conflict. Homer honours the dead on both sides in the Trojan War and he gives us more than two hundred names – Alice Oswald opens her fine ‘excavation’ of the Iliad, which is explicitly called Memorial, by listing them. But this list, horribly long as it is, does not ...

Slavery and Revenge

John Kerrigan, 22 October 2020

... his mouth opening and closing like a fish caught in a net.’There are echoes in this killing of Homer and Aeschylus. And Marriott’s note tells us that his title is taken from Simone Weil’s ‘The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force’, an essay that works out why, in Baldwin’s phrase, whatever goes up must come down. For Weil, ‘those who have force on loan ...

Georgian eyes are smiling

Frank Kermode, 15 September 1988

Bernard Shaw. Vol. I: The Search for Love, 1856-1898 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 486 pp., £16, September 1988, 0 7011 3332 5
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Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters. Vol. IV 
edited by Dan Laurence.
Bodley Head, 946 pp., £30, June 1988, 0 370 31130 2
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Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies. Vol. VIII 
edited by Stanley Weintraub.
Pennsylvania State, 175 pp., $25, April 1988, 0 271 00613 7
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Shaw’s Sense of History 
by J.L. Wisenthal.
Oxford, 186 pp., £22.50, April 1988, 0 19 812892 4
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Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Vol. III: 1903-1907 
edited by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies.
Cambridge, 532 pp., £35, April 1988, 0 521 32387 8
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Joseph Conrad: ‘Nostromo’ 
by Ian Watt.
Cambridge, 98 pp., £12.50, April 1988, 0 521 32821 7
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... with a great many more to come. So far, Shaw is absent from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken care of ...

Always the Bridesmaid

Terry Castle: Sappho, 30 September 1999

Victorian Sappho 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 278 pp., £40, May 1999, 0 691 05918 7
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... of her? Lauded throughout classical antiquity as the ‘Tenth Muse’ and greatest poet next to Homer, Sappho is believed to have lived on the Greek island of Lesbos some time around 600 BC. Plato and Aristophanes mention her; in ancient Rome, Horace and Catullus wrote famous imitations of her verses. Some six hundred years after her death, her renown was ...
... epic verbal landmarking, in the same way that prepared phrases keep on coming back in Virgil and Homer. Sandy had ‘a bit of strife parking the vehicle’ on his first record, Wild Life in Suburbia, back in 1959. He has had a bit of strife parking the vehicle ever since, often several times in the same monologue, when the announcement that there was a bit ...

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

... culture starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too. When he says ‘speech’ is ‘men’s business’, the word ...

Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas, 22 June 2000

On Beauty and Being Just 
by Elaine Scarry.
Princeton, 134 pp., $15.95, September 1999, 0 691 04875 4
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Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues, 216 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 9637264 5 5
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... to see the beauty of palm trees: a prolonged meditation on the tree as it appears in the world, in Homer and in the paintings of Matisse. But Scarry stretches language too far when she says that her earlier indifference to the palm tree was an error. To make an error I must be unable to acknowledge something of which I should have been aware. But what of ...

The Chase

Inigo Thomas: ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, 20 October 2016

... place of Orion and the hare in the sky is fixed, but the myth of the giant hunter is not stable. Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and the 16th-century poet and mythographer Natalis Comes all wrote about Orion. He appears in the account of the skies written by Hyginus in the second century AD. Keats wrote of ‘blind Orion hungry for the morn’ in Endymion, while ...

Faint Sounds of Shovelling

John Kerrigan: The History of Tragedy, 20 December 2018

Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 297 pp., £24, April 2017, 978 0 691 14189 3
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Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages 
by Tanya Pollard.
Oxford, 331 pp., £60, September 2017, 978 0 19 879311 3
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Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy 
by Richard Halpern.
Chicago, 313 pp., £34, April 2017, 978 0 226 43365 3
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Samson Agonistes: A Redramatisation after Milton 
by John Kinsella.
Arc, 109 pp., £10.99, October 2018, 978 1 911469 55 1
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... often considered a popular, jobbing writer, were literate in Greek. Chapman, of course, translated Homer. Pollard’s case is sometimes circumstantial and often complicated by the possibility that what looks Greek has in fact been drawn from Latin. One of her claims, building on the work of others, is that Greek tragedy was often accessed through Greek/Latin ...

Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
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... written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness ...

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence 
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023, 978 0 8090 9824 8
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... to the Wheatleys, Phillis began writing out of ‘curiosity’ and acquired small Latin. She knew Homer in Pope’s translations, and her poetry indicates some learning in geography and history. She continued writing in her ‘leisure Moments’ without any intention of publishing, or so the preface to her book later claimed. She was ...

A Kouros at the Met

T.J. Clark, 25 December 2025

... in the front rank was beautiful, to be commemorated as such; but Greek art and literature from Homer onwards never stopped reflecting on the reality – the physical price – of glory. The Met kouros is mighty and vulnerable. Maybe this, most deeply, is what prolongs the nervous laughter in the gallery. The young man’s ‘equipment’ is fabulous. But ...

Fellow Genius

Claude Rawson, 5 January 1989

The Poems of John Oldham 
edited by Harold Brooks and Raman Selden.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, February 1987, 0 19 812456 2
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... at p. 37, ll. 407ff.; Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ at p. 58, ll. 26ff.; Homer, Pliny and Boileau (and Addison and Johnson) on pygmies and cranes at p. 181, ll. 266ff. (also p. 328, ll. 159ff.); Boileau’s ‘De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu’à Rome’ (also a source of Johnson’s ‘China to Peru’) at p. 340; the menstrual ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... contemplate. Yet it is striking that there is one area where the film-makers made the character of Homer Parrish less functional than the actor who played him. Russell could put on his prostheses by himself, and wasn’t helpless without them. Could anything signal more clearly the reassuring fact – in this context – of impotence? The character’s ...