Flying Mud

Patrick Parrinder, 8 April 1993

The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells 
by Michael Coren.
Bloomsbury, 240 pp., £20, January 1993, 0 7475 1158 6
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“... readiness to kill to achieve these ends. The coloured races, the ‘swarms of black and brown’, were unlikely to meet the ‘new needs of efficiency’, he argued, and he equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews. The eventual disappearance of separate races would be the outcome of a gradual process of assimilation and attrition. This has not ...”

Aunts and Uncles

Michael Hofmann, 19 November 1992

A Feast in the Garden 
by George Konrad, translated by Imre Goldstein.
Faber, 394 pp., £14.99, October 1992, 0 571 16623 7
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Wartime Lies 
by Louis Begley.
Picador, 198 pp., £5.99, August 1992, 0 330 32099 8
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Brothers 
by Carmelo Samona, translated by Linda Lappin.
Carcanet, 131 pp., £13.95, August 1992, 0 85635 990 4
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Rolling 
by Thomas Healy.
Polygon, 161 pp., £7.95, July 1992, 0 7486 6121 2
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“... for thirty pages reluctant to let his book go, even to hand it over to his fictional alter ego, David Kobra. He has a sub-Kunderesque divagation on his ‘philosophy of ecstasy’ before going on to the ownership of property – descriptions of remote and magnificent real estate are my hot tip for fiction-writers in this last decade of the ...”

Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9
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“... to Robert Harris, with the memorable line: ‘Fuck Dacre, publish.’ Meanwhile the historian David Irving denounced the diaries as fakes, on the radio and television of three countries, although he had no sound evidence for saying so. Two weeks later, when everyone else was saying they were fakes, he made the front page of the Daily Express and the Times ...”

Wharton the Wise

D.A.N. Jones, 4 April 1985

The Missing Will 
by Michael Wharton.
Hogarth, 216 pp., £10.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2666 3
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“... Sir Oliver Lodge photographed fairies), Aunt would be close at hand, in helmet-hat and nigger-brown costume, to make sure Michael did not fall down a rabbit-hole, while Aunt, muttering Yorkshire gibberish, searched for magical comfrey. Later, as an Army officer lost in the Sind Desert, Michael Wharton sat alone on a stony hillside, waiting for Aunt to ...”

Loot

Ian Buruma, 9 March 1995

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War 
by Lynn Nicholas.
Macmillan, 498 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 333 62652 4
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“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...”

Mooching

Nicholas Spice: Dreaming of Vikram Seth, 29 April 1999

An Equal Music 
by Vikram Seth.
Phoenix House, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1999, 1 86159 117 9
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“... fearfully good-looking and I fancy I see a resemblance between him and the rabbit boy’s brother David, once a very naughty schoolboy, but now, I believe, a historian of art patronage in the 17th century at Edinburgh University. I have come to put a question to the Minister about W.H. Smith and its dominance in the magazine market, but I would much rather ...”

Balls and Strikes

Charles Reeve: Clement Greenberg, 5 April 2007

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg 
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis.
Lund Humphries, 321 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 85331 940 5
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“... features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg never published on the relatively obscure Donati, so ...”

William Wallace, Unionist

Colin Kidd: The Idea of Devolution, 23 March 2006

State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 
by Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford, 283 pp., £45, September 2005, 0 19 925820 1
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“... The new Parliament has not attracted major politicians. Labour heavyweights, such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, stayed in London; even Alex Salmond, the leader of the SNP, decided after a term in the Scottish Parliament that he preferred to abandon Edinburgh for the clubbability of Westminster. More significantly, after only a year as first minister ...”

Smut-Finder General

Colin Kidd: The Dark Side of American Liberalism, 25 September 2003

Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History 
by James Morone.
Yale, 575 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09484 1
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“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”

Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

Look Me in the Eye

Julian Bell: Art and the Brain, 8 October 2009

Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness 
by Semir Zeki.
Wiley-Blackwell, 234 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 4051 8557 8
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Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki 
by John Onians.
Yale, 225 pp., £18.99, February 2008, 978 0 300 12677 8
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Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images 
by Barbara Maria Stafford.
Chicago, 281 pp., £20.50, November 2008, 978 0 226 77052 9
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“... and natural history within a ‘big history’ such as those outlined by the American writers David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown – or, in the terminology of Edward O. Wilson, in a ‘consilience’, a convergence of intellectual disciplines, humanities with science. Ultimately, all teaching in the fine arts ...”

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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“... years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that school segregation was a danger to public health.Unfortunately for Wertham’s reputation, his work with children also ...”

Will I, Won’t I?

Daniel Soar: Dostoevsky’s Kiss, 6 March 2025

The Brothers Karamazov 
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael Katz.
Liveright, 900 pp., £15.99, July 2024, 978 1 324 09510 1
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“... since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least ...”

Ladders last a long time

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Reading Raphael Samuel, 23 May 2024

Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History 
by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick.
Verso, 295 pp., £25, January, 978 1 80429 280 8
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“... or the investor in the transatlantic slave trade. The classic account of industrialisation was David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus (1969), which argued that economic transformation was rooted in three crucial substitutions: of ‘machines … for human skill and effort’, of ‘inanimate for animate sources of power’, and of ‘mineral for vegetable ...”