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Make them go away

Neal Ascherson: Grossman’s Failure, 3 February 2011

To the End of the Land 
by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen.
Cape, 577 pp., £18.99, September 2010, 978 0 224 08999 9
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... is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.’ So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: ‘wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable’. Grossman’s American publisher called it ‘one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing … When critics look back at the ...

The Second Resolution Question

Owen Bennett-Jones: Post-Invasion Iraq, 1 June 2017

Iraq: The Cost of War 
by Jeremy Greenstock.
Heinemann, 467 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 1 78515 125 5
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... had more impact had it been published at the time it was written. The assessments of, for example, Paul Wolfowitz – identified by Greenstock as a key influence on the decision to go to war – and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, would have attracted more comment when these figures were more ...

Keeping Quiet on Child Abusers

Paul Foot, 4 July 1996

The Kincora Scandal: Political Cover-Up and Intrigue in Northern Ireland 
by Chris Moore.
Marine, 240 pp., £6.99, June 1996, 1 86023 029 6
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... paramilitary organisation which held that Irish Protestants were descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and that the coronation stone at Westminster came from Tara, Co. Meath, and had once been Jacob’s pillow. Mains and Semple were sexually greedy and indiscriminately attacked their charges, but McGrath was in a class of his own. He could carry out up to ...

Every Open Mouth a Grave

Thomas Jones: Joshua Ferris, 21 August 2014

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour 
by Joshua Ferris.
Viking, 337 pp., £16.99, May 2014, 978 0 670 91773 0
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... with a troubled childhood, now in early middle age, wondering what the point of it all is. But Paul O’Rourke has one redeeming feature: he’s a dentist. Which means that rather than pondering the mysteries of the universe and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s ...
Wagner in Performance 
edited by Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer.
Yale, 214 pp., £19.95, July 1992, 0 300 05718 0
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Wagner: Race and Revolution 
by Paul Lawrence Rose.
Faber, 304 pp., £20, June 1992, 9780571164653
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Wagner Handbook 
edited by Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, translated by John Deathridge.
Harvard, 711 pp., £27.50, October 1992, 0 674 94530 1
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Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini and An Evening at Rossini’s in Beau-Séjour 
by Edmond Michotte, translated by Herbert Weinstock.
Quartet, 144 pp., £12.95, November 1992, 9780704370319
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... and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on Paul Lawrence Rose’s Wagner: Race and Revolution, a book whose single-minded – albeit forceful and historically well-informed – account of the Wagner phenomenon renders the man and his operas pretty much as violent, revolutionary antisemitism. Reading ...

Degoogled

Joanna Biggs: Keith Gessen, 22 May 2008

All the Sad Young Literary Men 
by Keith Gessen.
Heinemann, 242 pp., £11.99, May 2008, 978 0 434 01848 2
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... know what their moment is. Missing it would seem unfair, since they care about things – Kosovo, Israel, Goya, Hegel, who’s publishing in the New American and Debate – and this rarefied sort of caring was unusual even at the good universities they went to. Gessen’s portrait of his generation is a study of ambition, but its point is not to dazzle us ...

Alleged War Criminals

Michael Byers: Saddam, Milosevic and Sharon, 22 July 2004

... the nephew of the until recently omnipresent Ahmad Chalabi, was handpicked by the US envoy, Paul Bremer, to direct the production. A quick cut-and-paste job provided a statute for the tribunal; a slate of safely anti-Saddam judges was rubber-stamped by Bremer’s Iraqi Governing Council. And after the council had been hastily transformed into a ...

Even if I married a whole harem of women I’d still act like a bachelor

Elaine Showalter: Isaac Bashevis Singer, 17 September 1998

Shadows on the Hudson 
by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Joseph Sherman.
Hamish Hamilton, 560 pp., £16.99, June 1998, 0 241 13940 6
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Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life 
by Janice Hadda.
Oxford, 254 pp., £22.50, February 1998, 0 19 508420 9
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... cold-hearted, conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the ...

Here in Canada

D.A.N. Jones, 21 March 1985

The Engineer of Human Souls 
by Josef Skvorecky, translated by Paul Wilson.
Chatto, 571 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 9780701129316
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The Governess 
by Patricia Angadi.
Gollancz, 181 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 575 03485 8
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The Anderson Question 
by Bel Mooney.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 9780241114568
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The Centre of the Universe is 18 Baedekerstrasse 
by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Hamish Hamilton, 199 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 0 241 11492 6
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... than the Canadians of the 1970s. Rebecca, the only survivor of a family of Jewish sisters, went to Israel. Prema, once an anti-Nazi saboteur, went to Australia but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 (just missing Smiricky on his way out) and wrote to him from their hometown, giving the news (mostly bad) about their old friends, and ...

Whitehall Farce

Paul Foot, 12 October 1989

The Intelligence Game: Illusions and Delusions of International Espionage 
by James Rusbridger.
Bodley Head, 320 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 370 31242 2
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The Truth about Hollis 
by W.J. West.
Duckworth, 230 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 7156 2286 2
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... or actually enhances a country’s security is doubtful. After all, despite the success of Mossad, Israel still lives in a perpetual state of fear and terrorism. But the intelligence game is now an international affair where winning and point-scoring is the most important thing.   No one dares ask whether any of it is worthwhile or could be done far more ...

Hungry Ghosts

Paul Connerton, 19 April 1990

Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Parts I-III 
edited by Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi.
Zone, 480 pp., £35.95, May 1989, 0 942299 25 6
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... with 380 images in colour and black and white. The essays range from Ancient Greece, Rome and Israel to Medieval and modern Europe; from the civilisations of China and Japan to those of Melanesia and the Aztecs. The bibliography, compiled by Barbara Duden, leaves no doubt as to the vast quantity of published work bearing directly on the social ...

It’s wild. It’s new. It turns men on

Yitzhak Laor: Amos Oz, 20 September 2001

The Same Sea 
by Amos Oz.
Chatto, 201 pp., £15.99, February 2001, 0 7011 6924 9
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... aged thirty. It was the custom/to marry daughters within the family.’ But then on her arrival in Israel, where people ‘even more Oriental’ than Balkan Jews like her were modernised, this tender, almost mute woman is remarried to Albert Danon, the protagonist. The English reader, however, cannot tell that in terms of ...

Is Syria next?

Charles Glass, 24 July 2003

... Alaska, frozen in the political rhetoric of a 1960s Soviet client, is now surrounded. Jordan, Israel and Turkey host American forces and are formidable foes in their own right. All three are in dispute with Syria over water rights, while Syria claims that both Israel and Turkey occupy part of the land allotted to it ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Carmen Callil’s Causes, 15 December 2022

... She was no separatist, however, and acknowledged how much she owed to the men who helped her: Paul Hamlyn, Michael Holroyd, Sonny Mehta, Christopher MacLehose, Bob Gavron. 1980s-90s. When Carmen moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers ...

How good is it?

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Inside the KJB, 3 February 2011

The Holy Bible: King James Version, 1611 Text 
edited by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 1552 pp., £50, October 2010, 978 0 19 955760 8
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Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 
by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 354 pp., £16.99, October 2010, 978 0 19 955759 2
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The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today 
by David Norton.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 521 61688 1
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The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences 
edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones.
Cambridge, 364 pp., £25, December 2010, 978 0 521 76827 6
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Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language 
by David Crystal.
Oxford, 327 pp., £14.99, September 2010, 978 0 19 958585 4
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... meticulously referenced genealogical tables of biblical characters culminating in Jesus Christ and Paul of Tarsus, to convince the good folk of Jacobean England that the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the notables of the Old Testament were gentry families rather like those who ruled the shires of England in 1611 – or better ...

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