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The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

... with its enemies and to make itself the master of the region. At the moment, it is exulting in its power, as it has not done since the end of the 1967 war, when the Jewish state tripled the territory under its control and was flooded by a wave of messianism. Its principal victims are the people of Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel also appears to be pursuing ...

Sic transit Marshall McLuhan

Frank Kermode, 17 March 1988

Letters of Marshall McLuhan 
edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye.
Oxford, 562 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 540594 3
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... As his programme developed, he began to wonder how he could fulfil it singlehanded, wishing he had power to hire his own colleagues. He badly needed to write a book about ‘the men of 1914’, the Modernists so critical to his version of history. He explained to Pound that the vortex he created with Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis had been debased, had become ‘a ...

Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

The World, the Text and the Critic 
by Edward Said.
Faber, 327 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 571 13264 2
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The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 201 pp., £4.95, December 1983, 0 416 36140 4
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The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. VIII: The Present 
edited by Boris Ford.
Penguin, 619 pp., £3.50, October 1983, 0 14 022271 5
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... of “textuality” ’ that literary theory has got itself into and appears to share Jonathan Swift’s contempt for what Said calls ‘the extraordinary Laputan idea that to a certain extent everything can be regarded as a text.’ Some Professor of Applied Linguistics in Gulliver’s Travels had ‘a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... They did not wish to be repatriated to what they saw as an illegitimate and oppressive occupying power. The Soviet Union’s dogged refusal to admit any distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Soviet citizens with regard to repatriation left it with no way of explaining why so many of its citizens refused to return.Tromly’s book is about the de facto ...

Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
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... really a revelation that the Elsinore depicted in Hamlet is the place of a relentless struggle for power better described in terms of the hunt than of Providence. The idea that Shakespeare’s tragedies depict lamentable but temporary blips in an otherwise divinely sanctioned hierarchical order is one that was fading even before ...

A Pair of Yellow Gloves

Tim Parks: Stendhal’s ‘Italian Chronicles’, 19 October 2017

Italian Chronicles 
by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2017, 978 1 5179 0011 3
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... he remarked that ‘noble souls are self-sufficient, while others are frightened and run mad.’ Jonathan Keates, in his insightful biography, frequently refers to this ‘Moscow-courage’ that Stendhal showed at key moments in his life. There were two duels. There was a commendation for courage at the Battle of Castelfranco in 1801. Essentially, Stendhal ...

Diary

Keith Thomas: Working Methods, 10 June 2010

... together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.Perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
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... interested in his own place in the firmament’. According to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, McGuinness tended to defer to Adams. If McGuinness was ever negotiating alone he would say he needed to discuss a proposal with Adams. Adams, in similar circumstances, sometimes kept his own counsel. In June 2004 Adams ‘very ...

Save the feet for later

Edmund Gordon: Leonora Carrington, 2 November 2017

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington 
by Joanna Moorhead.
Virago, 304 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 349 00877 6
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‘The Debutante’ and Other Stories 
by Leonora Carrington.
Silver Press, 153 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 0 9957162 0 9
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Down Below 
by Leonora Carrington.
NYRB, 69 pp., £8.99, May 2017, 978 1 68137 060 6
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Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde 
edited by Jonathan Eburne and Catriona McAra.
Manchester, 275 pp., £75, January 2017, 978 1 78499 436 5
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... of me, because I, too, was jammed between Saint-Martin and Spain. I was horrified by my own power. The Surrealists talked a good deal about madness, but Carrington was unusual in knowing what it felt like. In Andorra, she lost the ability to walk in a straight line. She saw secret messages on advertising billboards, and ‘heard the vibrations of beings ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
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... and Harriet Monroe?Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valley that poetry had the power to ‘soothe grief’. Some modern champions of ecopoetry may feel something similar, and the idea of poetry as a soothing, healing form of achieved attunement – Allingham called it a ‘mystic relation with the Universe’ – has a long ...

Permission to narrate

Edward Said, 16 February 1984

Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission 
by Sean MacBride.
Ithaca, 282 pp., £4.50, March 1984, 0 903729 96 2
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Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre 
by Amnon Kapeliouk.
Seuil, 117 pp.
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Final Conflict: The War in the Lebanon 
by John Bulloch.
Century, 238 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 7126 0171 6
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Lebanon: The Fractured Country 
by David Gilmour.
Robertson, 209 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 85520 679 9
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The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventures and American Bunglers 
by Jonathan Randal.
Chatto, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1983, 0 7011 2755 4
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God cried 
by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy.
Quartet, 141 pp., £15, June 1983, 0 7043 2375 3
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Beirut: Frontline Story 
by Salim Nassib, Caroline Tisdall and Chris Steele-Perkins.
Pluto, 160 pp., £3.95, March 1983, 0 86104 397 9
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The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the United States and the Palestinians 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 481 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 86104 741 9
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... and America, where definitions of the Middle East serve to screen the reality of Israeli actions. Jonathan Randal – a senior American foreign correspondent, veteran of Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria – like John Bulloch of the Daily Telegraph, like Kapeliouk, like Salim Nassib and Caroline Tisdall, like Tony Clifton, is a journalist writing what is in effect ...

Through the Trapdoor

Steven Shapin: Roger Penrose’s Puzzles, 26 June 2025

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius 
by Patchen Barss.
Atlantic, 337 pp., £25, November 2024, 978 1 83895 932 6
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... Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the ...

What are we allowed to say?

David Bromwich, 22 September 2016

... We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public life. Another motive of resistance occasionally pitches in: a radical, quasi-physical horror of seeing people coerce ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... technologies, especially those involving genetic manipulation, petrochemicals, non-sustainable power generation, human cells. It probably does make sense to talk about an ‘LM network’, in the way it’s possible to talk about Oxbridge or Scottish or London literary mafias, or Guardianistas, or YBAs. Right now, when I look at Spiked, out of 12 ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or to attack him, but to describe how the strange power of his book casts a spell over readers, as children, as pubescents, as adolescents, as adults, a spell some of them grow out of and others don’t. Except that ‘spell’ is far too neat and unembarrassing a metaphor, really, for a process as alarming as ...

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