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You gu gu and I gu gu

Andrew O’Hagan: Vaslav Nijinsky, 20 July 2000

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 
edited by Joan Acocella and Kyril Fitzylon.
Allen Lane, 312 pp., £20, August 1999, 0 7139 9354 5
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Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age 
by Modris Eksteins.
Macmillan, 396 pp., £12, May 2000, 0 333 76622 9
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... stood passive and bit his nails.’ But it was Nijinsky and Diaghilev who shared the new vision. Richard Buckle, Nijinsky’s biographer, describes what they were after: Fokine had rebelled against the academic dance, throwing out tutus, turn-out, and virtuosity for its own sake ... Diaghilev foresaw a dead-end to the ballet of local colour and the ...

Ink Blots, Pin Holes

Caroline Gonda: ‘Frankenstein’, 28 January 2010

The Original ‘Frankenstein’ 
by Mary Shelley, with Percy Shelley, edited by Charles Robinson.
Bodleian Library, 448 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 85124 396 9
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... and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of –––, as the play called Frankenstein’s creature. Mary Shelley, who went ...

Pretence for Prattle

Steven Shapin: Tea, 30 July 2015

Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World 
by Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger.
Reaktion, 326 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 78023 440 3
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... or encourage smuggling. In the middle of the 18th century, taxes effectively doubled the retail price of tea. Government ‘gaugers’ were sent out across the country to assay stocks held by merchants, to audit their books, and to seize tea smuggled from France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands into unguarded ports, especially in Scotland and the ...

It hits in the gut

Will Self, 8 March 2012

Militant Modernism 
by Owen Hatherley.
Zero, 146 pp., £9.99, April 2009, 978 1 84694 176 4
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A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain 
by Owen Hatherley.
Verso, 371 pp., £9.99, July 2011, 978 1 84467 700 9
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... that ‘this is basically a working-class Barbican, and if it were in EC1 rather than SE28 the price of a flat would be astronomical.’ Hatherley waxes eloquent on its central ‘unbelievably long interconnected block’, praises it for being ‘flood-proof and still architecturally cohesive’, and pours scorn on those ‘hack directors’ – Stanley ...

Brush for Hire

Eamon Duffy: Protestant painting, 19 August 2004

The Reformation of the Image 
by Joseph Leo Koerner.
Reaktion, 494 pp., £29.95, April 2004, 1 86189 172 5
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... Protestant art’s survival and continuing use as a didactic and propagandist tool, but at the price of the aesthetic collapse for which traditional art historians have berated it. Koerner’s readings of Cranach’s art are unfailingly arresting and inventive, but perhaps because of rather than despite their brilliance, one sometimes wonders if he ...

Tricky Minds

Michael Wood: Dostoevsky, 5 September 2002

Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-81 
by Joseph Frank.
Princeton, 784 pp., £24.95, May 2002, 0 691 08665 6
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... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: The Late Jonas Savimbi, 21 March 2002

... Conservative Caucus – created in the Ford years under the auspices of Jesse Helms and Richard Viguerie – put up $221,054 for its ‘victory over Communism in Southern Africa’. Savimbi was on the organisation’s list of priority concerns. In military terms, the Cubans were doing well in Angola, at a ...

A Light-Blue Stocking

Helen Deutsch: Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi, 14 May 2009

Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’ 
by Ian McIntyre.
Constable, 450 pp., £25, November 2008, 978 1 84529 449 6
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... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage ...

Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

... you know, their standards are nothing. But they – in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.’The Morally Concerned Trump: ‘The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid ...

Don’t worry about the pronouns

Michael Wood: Iris Murdoch’s First Novel, 3 January 2019

Under the Net 
by Iris Murdoch.
Vintage, 432 pp., £9.99, July 2019, 978 1 78487 518 3
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... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...

Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
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... in modern money), though a fancy locket, jewelled setting or ivory case would be extra. The price sounds reasonable, as long as you don’t try to compute the cost per square inch. He produced various formats and sizes, but the classic Hilliard model was a round or oval portrait a couple of inches wide. The diminutiveness, of course, is part of its ...

Shock Cities

Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0
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Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7
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... had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a price well below market rates. Renters, unsurprisingly, knew a good deal when they saw it; very quickly, the balance between owners and renters turned around. In 1979, 41 per cent of houses in Milton Keynes were owner-occupied; four years later that figure had ...

We can breathe!

Gabriel Winant: Anti-Fascists United, 1 August 2024

Everything Is Possible: Anti-fascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism 
by Joseph Fronczak.
Yale, 350 pp., £25, February 2023, 978 0 300 25117 3
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... struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt ...

Slim for Britain

Susan Pedersen: Solidarity Economy, 23 January 2025

The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire 
by Tehila Sasson.
Princeton, 298 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 0 691 25038 0
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... of canonical figures in the postwar pantheon of left-leaning ‘makers’ of the welfare state – Richard Titmuss, Michael Young and E.F. Schumacher – and argues that their international work in an era of rapid decolonisation led all three to look with a more critical eye on statism and ‘planning’. Gandhi was a major influence: his emphasis on community ...

Shady Acquisitions

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Corporate Imperialism, 21 September 2023

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism 
by Philip J. Stern.
Harvard, 408 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 98812 5
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... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...

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