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Tank

Robert Crawford, 21 July 2022

... night stars are jewels on black velvet; starshellsFirework all over. So, too, do tracers’Orange, green, red, blue and starch-harsh white.At 4 a.m. we’re shaken awake. By 5, it’s no longer night.Tanks crouch like toads; engines are warmed. Rank, blue smokeBurns with stagnant oil. Our tanks turn, avoiding rammingOne another in half-dark. From each stark ...

He or She

Robert Taubman, 8 November 1979

The Twyborn Affair 
by Patrick White.
Cape, 432 pp., £5.95
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... pre-First World War Riviera scene, picked out in loving detail (a 1912 high-set Austin in bottle-green, the music of Massenet and Chabrier), is made doubly unreal by the imaginations of these two, which dwell a great deal on Byzantine genealogy. What their relationship really is – if, for instance, it’s anything so ordinary as homosexual – the reader ...

Cry Treedom

Jonathan Bate, 4 November 1993

Forests: The shadow of Civilisation 
by Robert Pogue Harrison.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 226 31806 0
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... for spiritual regeneration as much as a manifesto for environmentally-sensitive policies. For Robert Harrison, too, the Enlightenment took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from ...

Broken Nights

Michael Hofmann, 3 April 2003

... Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?) About ‘broken knights’. Sir Bors and Sir Bedivere. In my one-piece pyjamas – My it doesn’t matter suit, With necessarily non-matching – Matchless, makeless, makeles – Added top, I pad Downstairs to look At the green time On the digital microwave ...

In a Tuft of Thistle

Robert Crawford: Borges is Coming, 16 December 2021

Borges and Me: An Encounter 
by Jay Parini.
Canongate, 299 pp., £14.99, August, 978 1 83885 022 7
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... thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert Louis Stevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New Yorker writer Alastair Reid, a Scot who was one of Borges’s translators and with whom Borges stayed in St Andrews, mentions the ...

Two Poems

Donald Hall, 19 August 1993

... the getaway car after the reception, I         found my ushers gathered to decorate the green Oldsmobile         the usual way – with Just Married, pieplates, ribbons, and straw.         I was furious. I rushed forward to kick Al who padlocked         tire chains to an axle, then swung at Dan who sprayed silver ...

At the Orangerie

Michael Hofmann: Marc and Macke, 20 June 2019

... and Macke are shown looking in the direction of Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Rousseau, Sonia and Robert Delaunay. It wasn’t so much about France as it was about making oneself modern – which, at least up until the Second World War, was impossible without France. Nationalist painters and critics attacked Marc, Macke and their followers for selling Germany ...

On Liking Herodotus

Peter Green, 3 April 2014

The Histories 
by Herodotus, translated by Tom Holland.
Penguin, 834 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 0 7139 9977 8
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Herodotus: Vol. I, Herodotus and the Narrative of the Past 
edited by Rosaria Vignolo Munson.
Oxford, 495 pp., £40, August 2013, 978 0 19 958757 5
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Herodotus: Vol. II, Herodotus and the World 
edited by Rosaria Vignolo Munson.
Oxford, 473 pp., £40, August 2013, 978 0 19 958759 9
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Textual Rivals: Self-Presentation in Herodotus’ ‘Histories’ 
by David Branscome.
Michigan, 272 pp., £60.50, November 2013, 978 0 472 11894 6
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The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus 
by Joseph Skinner.
Oxford, 343 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 979360 0
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... have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as Robert Fowler wrote in ‘Herodotus and His Contemporaries’ (1996), he had – in addition to Homer, elegiac and lyric poets and Athenian dramatists to give him patterns of narrative and characterisation – many now largely lost Ionian prose writers, mostly ...

At the Guggenheim Bilbao

John-Paul Stonard: Marc Chagall, 19 July 2018

... by a docile cow. It is a student painting, but a very good one; the dirty yellows and artificial green glow adhere to the scene, seeming to make sense of the dancing table and the upside-down head, a motif that became Chagall’s signature. ‘When I arrived in Paris I was the colour of a potato,’ Chagall told an interviewer in 1967, meaning that he was ...

Casualty Reports

Robert Taubman, 5 February 1981

The White Hotel 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 240 pp., £6.95, January 1981, 0 575 02889 0
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Riddley Walker 
by Russell Hoban.
Cape, 220 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 224 01851 5
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The Last Crime 
by John Domatilla.
Heinemann, 155 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 434 20090 5
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... out my happenings’, Riddley is involved with the legend of St Eustace, and the Green Man with vines growing out of his mouth, and a version of a Punch and Judy show. He struggles to master the meaning of these things. They are, of course, just about as remote and mythical to us – so that our own past is evoked as much as Riddley ...

One Enchanted Evening

J. Robert Lennon: Chris Adrian, 17 November 2011

The Great Night 
by Chris Adrian.
Granta, 292 pp., £16.99, June 2011, 978 1 84708 186 5
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... mechanicals, who happen to be rehearsing a musical version of the Charlton Heston movie Soylent Green. Much of the novel consists of flashbacks from the lives of the characters, and the serendipitous intersections between them, as they all move towards a final conflict with Puck, the Beast, which is destined to take place during the first, and perhaps ...

The Great Mary

Dinah Birch, 13 September 1990

Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-Eminent Edwardian 
by John Sutherland.
Oxford, 432 pp., £16.99, August 1990, 0 19 818587 1
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... her own exertions, Mary Ward made herself one of the most famous and highly paid women of her day. Robert Elsmere was a publishing prodigy (Sutherland has called it ‘probably the most popular novel of the century’), and it was followed by books that earned an apparently interminable flow of adulation and royalties. She used her literary status to make ...

Identity Crisis

Tom Shippey: Norman Adventurers, 16 March 2023

Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia 
by Levi Roach.
John Murray, 301 pp., £12.99, March, 978 1 5293 0032 1
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The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th-Century Europe 
by Judith Green.
Yale, 351 pp., £11.99, February, 978 0 300 27037 2
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... first as mercenaries, for pay, and then as rebels, for land: Hervé (full name not known), Robert Crispin (or ‘Curly’) and Roussel (‘Ginger’) de Bailleul. Roussel – the hero of Duggan’s Lady for Ransom – took part in the Byzantine campaign of 1071 against the invading Turks, which ended in disastrous defeat at Manzikert, but got away with ...

Who has the gall?

Frank Kermode: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 8 March 2007

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Penguin, 94 pp., £8.99, August 2006, 0 14 042453 9
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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
translated by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 114 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 0 571 22327 5
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... Library, contains the only surviving copy of the late 14th-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It lacks a title and shares the manuscript with three other poems of a devotional character, also without titles, and probably, according to the experts, by the same poet. Of this group Pearl, an allegory about a man’s grief at the death of his ...

Red Flag, Green Light

Rosa Lyster: Keep the Con Going, 16 November 2023

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World 
by Yepoka Yeebo.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5266 6857 8
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... long-standing mystery of charisma, and some people’s ability to turn a screaming red flag into a green light.Blay-Miezah spent the years after the coup running various low-level scams in West Africa and the US, apparently with no real goal other than getting to stay free of charge in fancy hotels. He posed as an executive with the African Development ...

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