He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
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... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with his ...

It could be me

Joanna Biggs: Sheila Heti, 24 January 2013

How Should a Person Be? 
by Sheila Heti.
Harvill Secker, 306 pp., £16.99, January 2013, 978 1 84655 754 5
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... Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery, and in 2011 she worked with the illustrator Clare Rojas on a children’s book called We Need a Horse. That year, Heti also began a novel, The Moral Development of Misha, about her friend Misha ...

Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Christopher Hitchens: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 4 June 1998

1968: Marching in the Streets 
by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 
by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.
Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9
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The Love Germ 
by Jill Neville.
Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2
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... standards’ can waste an awful lot of time. Anyway, I found the exact phrase for it when I met Adam Michnik, one of the Polish sixty-eighters, a few years later. ‘After all, like socialism, the words freedom and democracy have been discredited by governments and parties. But we do not abandon them for this reason. The real struggle, for us, is for ...

Samuel Johnson goes abroad

Claude Rawson, 29 August 1991

A Voyage to Abyssinia 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Joel Gold.
Yale, 350 pp., £39.50, July 1985, 0 300 03003 7
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Rasselas, and Other Tales 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Gwin Kolb.
Yale, 290 pp., £24.50, March 1991, 0 300 04451 8
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A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) 
by Samuel Johnson.
Longman, 1160 pp., £195, September 1990, 0 582 07380 4
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The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746-1773 
by Allen Reddick.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £30, October 1990, 0 521 36160 5
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Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts 
by Morris Brownell.
Oxford, 195 pp., £30, March 1989, 0 19 812956 4
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Johnson’s Shakespeare 
by G.F. Parker.
Oxford, 204 pp., £25, April 1989, 0 19 812974 2
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... Such attitudes, we’ve been taught to recognise, weren’t proof against the old imperial Adam, who lurks in all occidentals, and is culturally and intellectually, as well as politically and commercially, predatory. Johnson’s occasional interest in visiting India may have included some idea of making his fortune, though he mainly expressed ...

Hoarder of Malt

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare, 7 January 1999

Shakespeare: A Life 
by Park Honan.
Oxford, 479 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 19 811792 2
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £11.99, December 1998, 0 7190 5425 7
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... local schoolchildren, all walking in time to regimental trumpets and the inane jingling of morris-dancers, the Immortal invoked and perhaps appeased by all this partakes at once of municipal worthy, folk hero, national icon, monarch, pagan god, Catholic saint and Messiah. (The last analogy is made all but inescapable by the name of Shakespeare’s ...

A Man with My Trouble

Colm Tóibín: Henry James leaves home, 3 January 2008

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume I 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 391 pp., £57, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2584 8
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The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume II 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 524 pp., £60, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2607 4
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... reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal … It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made – or they a “keen analysis” of her – whether ...

Francis and Vanessa

Peter Campbell, 15 March 1984

Francis Bacon 
by Michel Leiris, translated by John Weightman.
Phaidon, 271 pp., £50, September 1983, 0 7148 2218 3
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Vanessa Bell 
by Frances Spalding.
Weidenfeld, 399 pp., £12.95, August 1983, 0 297 78162 6
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The Omega Workshops 
by Judith Collins.
Secker, 310 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 436 10562 4
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The Omega Workshops 1913-1919: Decorative Arts of Bloomsbury 
Crafts Council, 96 pp., £6.95, March 1984, 0 903798 72 7Show More
The Omega Workshops: Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1911-1920 
Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 80 pp., £4.95, February 1984, 0 947564 00 4Show More
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... not to be missed’. The best-publicised painted room of the last year or so was, after all, Adam Ant’s. The Omega rejection of pastel-toned Edwardian decoration sprang from a nursery anarchy which is at least as well understood by today’s style-hungry young as the tribal uses of African masks were in Fitzroy and Gordon Squares, while the Omega ...

Inside the Sausage Factory

Jenny Turner: In the Cryosphere, 6 January 2022

... for my paper, I told them, which that morning had published two pieces (by James Butler and Adam Tooze) about Andreas Malm, the Swedish climate theorist and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm says it’s time, I said, for climate campaigners to move on from XR-type theatrics to disciplined sabotage of fossil-fuel infrastructure; everything is so ...

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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... from a sort of indignation disorder.) New in this text is the priority given to man as artist; Adam may have fallen, but actually he ‘sought the creative life’. For Newman ‘the aesthetic act always precedes the social one’; ‘man’s first expression’ was ‘a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication’. Once more an American version ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... are Betjeman’s Shell county guides – and his technique is comparable to that used in Adam Thorpe’s short story ‘In the Author’s Footsteps’, in his new collection, Is This the Way You Said?* Here an obstinately backward-looking rambler uses old maps and guidebooks acquired from second-hand bookshops to plan his assaults on present-day ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... state of affairs that exists is what Hill came to call, in a favourite phrase taken from William Morris, ‘plutocratic anarchy’, or ‘Anarchical Plutocracy’, or ‘oligarchic democracy’, or ‘oligarchic mob rule’, something which became a preoccupying theme. ‘I think at certain periods in our history some good poets have felt they have a ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... Bridge and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than ...

Snobs

Jon Elster, 5 November 1981

La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Editions de Minuit, 670 pp., £9.05, August 1979, 2 7073 0275 9
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... The theme struck by The Fable of the Bees has been pursued for more than two centuries, by Adam Smith, Malinowski, Merton and many others. To cite just two examples: income inequalities are justified by their positive effect on savings, investment, average income and ultimately on minimal income; political apathy is seen as a functional prerequisite ...