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An Invertebrate Left

Perry Anderson, 12 March 2009

... of the postwar Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided. But behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most ...

Some girls want out

Hilary Mantel: Spectacular saintliness, 4 March 2004

The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint 
by Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni.
Chicago, 320 pp., £21, March 2003, 0 226 04196 4
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Saint Thérèse of Lisieux 
by Kathryn Harrison.
Weidenfeld, 160 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 297 84728 7
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The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty 
by Helen King.
Routledge, 196 pp., £50, September 2003, 0 415 22662 7
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A Wonderful Little Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl 
by Siân Busby.
Short Books, 157 pp., £5.99, June 2004, 1 904095 70 4
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... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... make little sense because he doesn’t give us so much as a hint of the coercive menace that lay behind them. For instance, he describes the Blair government’s response to the fuel blockade in 2000 as a victory for his principled position that ‘whatever we did had to be justifiable on wider policy grounds.’ He makes no mention of Blair’s threat ...

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
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... men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes ...

Empire of Signs

James Wood: Joseph Roth, 4 March 1999

The String of Pearls 
by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Granta, 224 pp., £12.99, May 1998, 1 86207 087 3
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... it was uttered, and so never reach the person called.’ Or: ‘The lady’s smoothly shaved legs lay side by side like two similarly clad sisters, both in silk sheaths.’ Or: the waiters ‘moved about like gardeners; when they poured coffee and milk into the cups, it was as if they were watering white flower-beds. Trees and kiosks stood on the ...

Le Grand Jacques

R.W. Johnson, 9 October 1986

Jacques Doriot: Du Communisme au Fascisme 
by Jean-Paul Brunet.
Balland, Paris, 563 pp., August 1986, 2 7158 0561 6
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... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...
... Guardian (21 June) about the latest eruption in the Observer’s boardroom, Lonrho’s spokesman, Paul Spicer, was not concerned to confirm or deny the accuracy of the report: his only response was to warn that a search would be made to discover which of the directors had leaked the information and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of ...

He Roared

Hilary Mantel: Danton, 6 August 2009

Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror 
by David Lawday.
Cape, 294 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 224 07989 1
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... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...

Like a Bar of Soap

Bee Wilson: Work, don’t play, 15 December 2022

The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori 
by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Gregory Conti.
Other Press, 368 pp., £27.99, May 2022, 978 1 63542 084 5
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... method?Her American followers didn’t appreciate that the roots of many of Montessori’s ideas lay in her religion. On Christmas Day 1939, she gave a speech in which she announced that ‘the fallen adult must look to the child for salvation.’ In Barcelona, her method was adopted as a Catholic system of education, championed by Father Antonio Casulleras ...

Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...

Unhappy Families

Angela Carter, 16 September 1982

The Beauties and Furies 
by Christina Stead.
Virago, 329 pp., £3.95, July 1982, 0 86068 175 0
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... from the Surrealists, especially since this novel takes place in a Paris that is decidedly Paul Eluard’s capitale de la douleur. And, at this stage, Stead is omnivorously assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language ...

Euro-Gramscism

Tom Nairn, 3 July 1980

Gramsci and Marxist Theory 
edited by Chantal Mouffe.
Routledge, 288 pp., £9.50, November 1979, 0 7100 0358 7
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Gramsci and the State 
by Christine Buci-Glucksmann.
Lawrence and Wishart, 470 pp., £14, February 1980, 9780853154839
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Gramsci’s Politics 
by Anne Showstack Sassoon.
Croom Helm, 261 pp., £12.95, April 1980, 9780709903260
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... possess nothing more than a veneer of civilisation – one has only to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath,’ and the best solution would be a universal bloodbath, after which the oppressors will find it is a bit late to be sorry ‘they left the hordes in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today.’ Sardism gave way to ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... a call back to nature, and a subway ticket to modernity.’The origins of the New Negro Movement lay further back, in the widespread social and cultural upheaval in America at the beginning of the century. It was a ‘time of great transition,’ according to Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay’s biographer, when ‘old, fundamental assumptions that had dominated ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... from London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... firm foundation to the current idea of Central Europe, the future might do so, for here surely lay the Achilles heel of the Soviet Empire. In this sense, the definition of Central Europe was political: it designated the frontline against Communism, wherever that might be; Garton Ash even cites a friend’s opinion that we might now say George Orwell was a ...

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