The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Blackwell, 480 pp., £25, December 1996, 0 631 18746 4
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Coleridge: Selected Poems 
edited by Richard Holmes.
HarperCollins, 358 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 00 255579 4
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Coleridge’s Later Poetry 
by Morton Paley.
Oxford, 147 pp., £25, June 1996, 0 19 818372 0
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A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse 
edited by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 232 pp., £7.99, March 1996, 0 571 17604 6
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... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...

Mr Trendy Sicko

James Wolcott, 23 May 2019

White 
by Brett Easton Ellis.
Picador, 261 pp., £16.99, May 2019, 978 1 5290 1239 2
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... truly represent a distinct mutant species of crybaby. Ellis’s​ first non-fiction work, White, is an expansion of his podcast concerns and complaints but not a deepening – more of a distention. Although the book has been promoted as an ‘incendiary polemic’, it’s more of a lazy Susan of memoir, cultural reflections, pharmacological ...

Blite and Whack

Paul Seabright, 19 January 1984

A Pocket Popper 
edited by David Miller.
Fontana, 479 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 00 636414 4
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The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. Vol. I: Realism and the Aim of Science 
by Karl Popper, edited by W.W. Bartely.
Hutchinson, 420 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 09 151450 9
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The Philosophy of Popper 
by T.E. Burke.
Manchester, 222 pp., £16, July 1983, 0 7190 0904 9
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In Pursuit of Truth: Essays in Honour of Karl Popper’s 80th Birthday 
edited by Paul Levinson.
Harvester, 337 pp., £25, May 1983, 0 7108 0424 5
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Science and Moral Priority 
by Roger Sperry.
Blackwell, 135 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 9780631131991
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Art, Science and Human Progress 
edited by R.B. McConnell.
Murray, 196 pp., £12.50, June 1983, 0 7195 4018 6
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... in reasoning from individual instances to general laws. Thus no number of observations of white swans can justify our assertion that all swans everywhere are white. They cannot even make it probable, he insists, that all swans everywhere are white. There is only one way of ...

At the Courtauld

Esther Chadwick: Jonathan Richardson, 10 September 2015

... Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of Painting, published in 1715, was on Delacroix’s ...

At Tate Modern

Brian Dillon: Klein/Moriyama, 22 November 2012

... he was the graphic equal of Irving Penn and a far stranger photographer than, say, David Bailey or Richard Avedon. But then he has long been ambivalent about his fashion photography; already in 1966 he had skewered that milieu with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, the first in a series of satirical films that would take up much of his next decade. Klein effectively ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Battleship Potemkin’, 28 April 2011

Battleship Potemkin 
directed by Sergei Eisenstein.
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... each and tells us that ‘the raging sea boils.’ You could say that, and you could also say, as Richard Taylor does in his book on the film, that Eisenstein is showing us what moving pictures alone can do by way of representing reality, is remembering all the shifting, unfaked water in the work of the Lumière Brothers, for example. Or you could just watch ...

Consider the Hedgehog

Katherine Rundell, 24 October 2019

... spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals with the exception of badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by sprinkling boiling water on their backs, which, unlike his dietary information, does seem ...

On the Skyline

Peter Campbell: Antony Gormley, 21 June 2007

... way you have to concentrate to keep your sense of direction. I suppose it’s much the same with white-outs in the Arctic or the mountains, but I’ve never been in one of those. Once you enter the bright clamminess of Blind Light the experience you have is about as structureless as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: James Gillray, 21 June 2001

... are passages of wiry drawing in some plates – for example, the figure of Pitt as Death and the white horse which carries him in Presages of the Millennium – which only the most vigorous and controlled pen drawing could match, and which only a master in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (...

Our Slaves Are Black

Nicholas Guyatt: Theories of Slavery, 4 October 2007

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World 
by David Brion Davis.
Oxford, 440 pp., £17.99, May 2006, 0 19 514073 7
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The Trader, the Owner, the Slave 
by James Walvin.
Cape, 297 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 0 224 06144 5
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The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 
by Colin Kidd.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 521 79324 6
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The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview 
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese.
Cambridge, 828 pp., £18.99, December 2005, 0 521 85065 7
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... be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white. The petitioners’ circumstances were unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found ...

Magical Realism

D.A.N. Jones, 1 August 1985

The House of the Spirits 
by Isabel Allende, translated by Magda Bogin.
Cape, 368 pp., £8.95, July 1985, 0 224 02231 8
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Linden Hills 
by Gloria Naylor.
Hodder, 304 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 9780340360330
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Careful with the Sharks 
by Constantine Phipps.
Cape, 216 pp., £8.95, May 1985, 9780224023085
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... The well-paced, ironic narrative, cleverly modulating into the bemused, commonsensical natter of white neighbours watching the black suburb enlarge itself, has the effect of a growing cycle of legends. The Luther Nedeed of our own day is a grave and rational man, it appears, consciously offering ‘role-models’ to black bourgeois, but he is also a man ...

Don’t laugh

Amit Chaudhuri: Hari Kunzru, 8 August 2002

The Impressionist 
by Hari Kunzru.
Hamish Hamilton, 435 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 241 14169 9
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... takes his epigraph from Kipling’s novel) and Colonel Skinner, and masters of disguise like Richard Burton. Forrester is not the only one caught in the powerful storm. A beautiful, ‘ungovernable’ woman, Amrita, is in a palanquin on her way to get married. In the storm, which rapidly becomes a flood, she is separated from her retinue; she discovers ...

Boofy’s Bill

Alex Harvey, 18 September 1997

... of activity was Piccadilly, with its toilets and rent boys – there was even a gay bar called the White Bear with an entrance in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Policemen sat around drinking tea in the attendant’s room of public lavatories, scratching at the white painted glass to get a better look at the ...

Orgasm isn’t my bag

Vivian Gornick: On the ‘Village Voice’, 6 June 2024

The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture 
by Tricia Romano.
Public Affairs, 571 pp., £27.50, February, 978 1 5417 3639 9
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... to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the ...

Thanks to the Tea Party

Steve Fraser: 1970s America, 17 March 2011

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s 
by Judith Stein.
Yale, 367 pp., £25, May 2010, 978 0 300 11818 6
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Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class 
by Jefferson Cowie.
New Press, 464 pp., £19.99, September 2010, 978 1 56584 875 7
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... politics, in individual rights rather than collective ones. Moreover, they had come to perceive white working-class men as the enemy: racist, patriarchal and jingoistic, fatally tainted by ‘white skin privilege’. The trade-union bureaucrats were just as hostile to McGovernites and refused to endorse their ...