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Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said: The CIA, 30 September 1999

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Granta, 509 pp., £20, July 1999, 1 86207 029 6
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... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a ...

Cockneyism

Gregory Dart: Leigh Hunt, 18 December 2003

The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt 
edited by Robert Morrison and Michael Eberle-Sinatra.
Pickering & Chatto, £495, July 2003, 1 85196 714 1
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... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...

At Tate Britain

Anne Wagner: Hepworth, 27 August 2015

... I wish​ someone would explain why yet another major Tate Britain exhibition has come under critical fire. The latest round of brickbats started flying a good six months before Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World was installed (until 25 October). Jonathan Jones already felt certain in January that the show ‘wants to free’ Hepworth ‘from any provincial status’, so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra ...

Peripheries

Charles Rzepka, 21 March 1991

The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the 19th Century 
by Susan Manning.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £32.50, May 1990, 0 521 37237 2
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... election and reprobation is ingenious and suggestive. It is also troubling. For the major features of the literature she identifies as ‘puritan-provincial’ are to be found in other national literatures as well, including those of Catholic France, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. There are also non-puritan tributaries feeding into streams of ...

Glory

Eric Hobsbawm, 3 June 1982

War and Society in Revolutionary Europe 1770-1870 
by Geoffrey Best.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 336 pp., £12, March 1982, 0 00 634747 9
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European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815-1960 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 285 pp., £12, March 1982, 0 00 634826 2
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... and it is aware of what other historians are doing. Even so specifically a military historian as John Keegan writes recognisable and impressive social history. The major asset of British historians of war is not so much that they have had experience of the armed forces in combat – many have, but much of the best work ...

Socialism

Jon Elster, 15 November 1984

The Politics of Socialism: An Essay in Political Theory 
by John Dunn.
Cambridge, 107 pp., £15, October 1984, 0 521 26736 6
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... that whatever is desirable is possible, and that whatever is desirable and possible is inevitable. John Dunn’s short book is much concerned with the disastrous consequences of this Utopian strand in socialism. He argues that socialists, if they want to be taken seriously, must show that the society they propose is economically viable, and that the process of ...

Kettle of Vultures

Jamie Martin: A History of Interest, 16 November 2023

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest 
by Edward Chancellor.
Penguin, 398 pp., £12.99, September, 978 1 80206 015 7
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... effects of different rates than on the exegesis of ancient texts. In a pamphlet from 1691, John Locke made an early, influential argument against efforts to hold down interest rates, claiming that this incentivised speculation, hurt prudent savers, and benefited only ‘bankers and scriveners’ who were ‘skilled in the arts of putting out ...

In Search of People’s History

Eric Hobsbawm, 19 March 1981

People’s History and Socialist Theory 
edited by Raphael Samuel.
Routledge, 417 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 7100 0765 5
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British Labour History 
by E.H. Hunt.
Weidenfeld, 428 pp., £18.50, January 1981, 0 297 77785 8
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... demands, questions and arguments. Somewhere in these 417 pages readers may discover sketches for a major revaluation of utopian socialism (by Stedman Jones), significant new contributions to the debate on the origins of modern capitalism (by Hans Medick), a first-hand account of what history means for working coal-miners (by Dave Douglass), pioneer studies of ...

Austward Ho

Patrick Parrinder, 18 May 1989

Moon Palace 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 307 pp., £11.99, April 1989, 0 571 15404 2
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Prisoner’s Dilemma 
by Richard Powers.
Weidenfeld, 348 pp., £12.95, March 1989, 0 297 79482 5
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A Prayer for Owen Meany 
by John Irving.
Bloomsbury, 543 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 0 7475 0334 6
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... Way to a Dance was a historical fantasy in which very ordinary characters were caught up in some major events of the 1914-18 War, notably the German invasion of Belgium and the episode of Henry Ford’s ‘Peace Ship’. Prisoner’s Dilemma brings a similar approach to some of the events of 1939-45. Here Walt Disney is made to play the part of Henry ...

Crotchet Castles

Peter Campbell, 6 December 1984

William Kent 
by Michael Wilson.
Routledge, 276 pp., £30, July 1984, 0 7100 9983 5
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James Gibbs 
by Terry Friedman.
Yale, 362 pp., £40, November 1984, 0 300 03172 6
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Sir John Soane, Architect 
by Dorothy Stroud.
Faber, 300 pp., £32, May 1984, 9780571130504
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The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable 
by Graham Reynolds.
Yale, 880 pp., £140, October 1984, 0 300 03151 3
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... in the office of works, or (very frequently through that connection) been responsible for major buildings, were succeeded by a generation who had been pupils and assistants in the offices of their seniors, had attended lectures at the Royal Academy, and belonged to professional bodies. Their offices became more substantial and their relations with ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Hungarians and Falklanders, 17 February 1983

... on the Times in the London Library. The name that stirred my memories and regrets most was Canon John Collins, who died on New Year’s Eve. John Collins was that very rare thing: a good man. He was not particularly a rebel or a radical. He was very conventional in many of his ways, as in being a Canon of St Paul’s. But ...

What’s not to like?

Stefan Collini: Ernest Gellner, 2 June 2011

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography 
by John Hall.
Verso, 400 pp., £29.99, July 2010, 978 1 84467 602 6
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... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...

Great Good Places of the Mind

John Passmore, 6 March 1980

Utopian Thought in the Western World 
by Frank Manuel.
Blackwell, 896 pp., £19.50, November 1979, 9780631123613
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... thesis informs the whole. ‘Our book is constructed,’ so its authors tell us, ‘of seven major constellations and a few minor ones, arranged in chronological order, preceded by two exordia, one methodological and the other mythological, the whole crowned with a prophetical peroration.’ Classical Utopianism is relegated to the mythological ...

The Man from Nowhere

John Sturrock: Burying André Malraux, 9 August 2001

André Malraux: Une Vie 
by Olivier Todd.
Gallimard, 694 pp., frs 175, April 2001, 2 07 074921 5
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... was a geopolitical event well worth his attention, and it became the subject of two of his three major novels, Les Conquérants (1928) and La Condition humaine (1933). The first of these, which is set in Canton, was written before he ever set foot in China, but what he’d seen of Hong Kong and Saigon was enough to supply the novel with its ample urban ...

Other People’s Capital

John Lanchester: Conrad and Barbara Black, 14 December 2006

Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge 
by Tom Bower.
Harper, 436 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 00 723234 9
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... that night. It’s no surprise to learn that Black has had his troubles with depression. The other major shareholders of Ravelston had no children. After their deaths, Black befriended their widows, and persuaded them to align their votes with his. Before long he was able to take control of Ravelston, and borrowed the money to buy out the other ...

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