... The first exhibit is a holographic slave, about to be auctioned, who speaks to visitors from a small underground cage. In the final exhibit holographic prisoners in orange jumpsuits sit behind protective glass. The museum traces the line between slavery and contemporary incarceration in the US – one in three black men spend time in prison; the prison ...

That Wooden Leg

Michael Wood: Conversations with Don Luis, 7 September 2000

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel 
translated by Garrett White.
California, 266 pp., £17.50, April 2000, 0 520 20840 4
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... Obscure Object of Desire, 1977).Viridiana has a number of startling and now famous images – a small crucifix flicks open to become a menacing knife; riotous, feasting beggars compose themselves into a parody of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a snatch of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ blaring in the soundtrack – and a ferocious implied argument about ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... expedition: ‘Drop your drift net into the ocean and you pull up all sorts of fish, big and small, and you hope someone’s going to drop the small fish back in before it’s too late but you can never be sure that’s going to happen.’ As well as small fry like Conteh, the law ...

Plus or Minus One Ear

Steven Shapin: Weights and Measures, 30 August 2012

World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement 
by Robert Crease.
Norton, 317 pp., £18.99, October 2011, 978 0 393 07298 3
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... measures were an index of justice: ‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small.’ Ancient and medieval thought ran together the notion of measure and moderation – proportion, due measure, just measure. Double standards were ...

Topography v. Landscape

John Barrell: Paul Sandby, 13 May 2010

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain 
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... Rembrandt, and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. Fuseli did introduce a small saving clause in defence of painters of ‘Views’: their ‘enumerations’ of the objects in a scene become ‘little more than topography’ only if they are not ‘assisted by nature, dictated by taste, or chosen for character’. But this does little ...

Shandying It

John Mullan: Sterne’s Foibles, 6 June 2002

Laurence Sterne: A Life 
by Ian Campbell Ross.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, March 2001, 0 19 212235 5
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... Shandy. His glee seems understandable. This obscure Yorkshire clergyman, known as a wit only to a small circle of eccentric friends, had reached his mid-forties without achieving any kind of fame or affluence. He was unhappily married, bored with parish duties and ill-equipped to climb the ecclesiastical greasy pole, but his talents were finally being ...

The Ultimate Socket

David Trotter: On Sylvia Townsend Warner, 23 June 2022

Lolly Willowes 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Penguin, 161 pp., £9.99, October 2020, 978 0 241 45488 6
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Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life 
by Frances Bingham.
Handheld Press, 344 pp., £15.99, May 2021, 978 1 912766 40 6
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... a wide range of artists and writers, including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in ...

The Mouth of Calamities

Musab Younis: Césaire’s Reversals, 5 December 2024

Return to My Native Land 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock.
Penguin, 65 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 53539 4
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. . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent 
by Aimé Césaire, translated by Alex Gil.
Duke, 298 pp., £22.99, August 2024, 978 1 4780 3064 5
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Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits 
by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Oxford, 160 pp., £70, February 2024, 978 0 19 286722 3
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... a material level. Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so. In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about ...

Boys will be soldiers

Brian Harrison, 20 October 1983

Sure and Stedfast: A History of the Boys’ Brigade, 1883-1984 
edited by John Springhall.
Collins, 304 pp., £10, June 1983, 0 00 434280 1
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... life of their own. Ariès points out how Medieval artists portrayed the young Jesus as a small adult: they did not know how to illustrate childhood in any other way. From the studies so far published, it seems that only in the late 18th century did childhood come to seem important in itself; for some, it became an ideal upon which to model the adult ...

Maids

Philip Horne, 1 April 1983

The Slow Train to Milan 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 254 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 224 02077 3
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Holy Pictures 
by Clare Boylan.
Hamish Hamilton, 201 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 241 10926 4
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Pilgermann 
by Russell Hoban.
Cape, 240 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 224 02072 2
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September Castle: A Tale of Love 
by Simon Raven.
Blond and Briggs, 261 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 85634 123 1
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The Watcher 
by Charles Maclean.
Allen Lane, 343 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 7139 1559 5
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The Little Drummer Girl 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 433 pp., £8.95, March 1983, 0 340 32847 9
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... deals with them as a function of paranoia. The title of its first Book (also an epigraph to Stephen King’s The Shining, an evident and superior precursor) alludes to Goya’s warning that ‘the sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the premise of a genre which knows the dangers of the Unseen. Martin Gregory is an unreliable narrator of the unhappiest ...

Ikonography

Keith Kyle, 4 July 1985

Eisenhower. Vol. I: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect 1890-1952 Vol. II: The President 1952-1969 
by Stephen Ambrose.
Allen and Unwin, 637 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 04 923073 5
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Ike’s Letters to a Friend: 1941-1958 
edited by Robert Griffith.
Kansas, 211 pp., $19.95, October 1984, 0 7006 0257 7
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... his siblings, had been set up on marriage by his father with a piece of property of his own and a small amount of capital. Raising a mortgage on the property, he then plunged into business; in two years it had folded, the mortgage was foreclosed, and David Eisenhower never tried his hand again. Rescued by his family, he was able to raise six sons in the ...

That Wilting Flower

Hilary Mantel: The Lure of the Unexplained, 24 January 2008

Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained 
edited by Una McGovern.
Chambers, 760 pp., £35, October 2007, 978 0 550 10215 7
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... chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of the ...

Corbyn’s Progress

Tariq Ali, 3 March 2016

... monopoly of Scottish representation in the House of Commons and most opinion polls indicate a small majority in favour of Scottish independence. The impact of this on the crisis of Labourism, old and new, should not be underestimated. It is the most dramatic change in the UK party system since the foundation of the Labour Party itself. Add to this the ...

Asterisks and Obelisks

Colin Burrow, 7 March 2019

Poems of Sextus Propertius 
edited and translated by Patrick Worsnip.
Carcanet, 253 pp., £12.99, September 2018, 978 1 78410 651 5
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... how the text should read. The radical and impressive Oxford Classical Texts edition of 2007 by Stephen Heyworth, on which Patrick Worsnip bases his new translation, is bedecked with dots, crosses in circles, lacunae, and brackets both square and pointy. Textual notes rise up the page as a great wave of scholars – Lachmann, Housman, Heinsius, Scaliger ...