Boomerang

Sylvia Lawson, 18 February 1988

Australians: A Historical Library 
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... endorsement from the Australian Bicentennial Authority, and does not carry the ABA’s ubiquitous green and gold logo; the historians were, in fact, refused support from that source. They were attempting a generally progressive and innovative, open kind of history, social-democratic in general intent, however the writers’ positions might vary from ...

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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... mighty depths below. Clare is thought of as a marginal, provincial poet, who inhabited a remote green world of heath, woodland, riverbank and marshland, but Bate draws attention to the richness of the cultural life around him. Stamford, to the northwest of Helpston, just over the county border into Lincolnshire, was no backwater. Books were published ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... from Arthur’s Seat to the Highland Church and on to the Castle Rock. Motherly, rounded, green and tender are the great Pentland hills, Caerketton and Allermuir, watching over Gilmerton and Straiton and the city beyond.In another sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, ...

Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty, 25 July 1991

The Later Works 1925-1953. Vol. XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 
by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston.
Southern Illinois, 786 pp., $50, August 1990, 0 8093 1661 7
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Dewey 
by J.E. Tiles.
Routledge, 256 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 415 00908 1
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John Dewey and American Democracy 
by Robert Westbrook.
Cornell, 608 pp., $32.95, May 1991, 0 8014 2560 3
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Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford 
by Casey Blake.
North Carolina, 370 pp., $38.45, November 1990, 0 8078 1935 2
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... we have shrugged it off. Russell thought that the holism which Dewey took over from Hegel and T.H. Green made it impossible for Dewey to tell us ‘about the nature of things before they are inquired into’. It does indeed. From Dewey’s angle, such a request is like asking to be told about how things are without using any particular description of ...

Supersensual Ear

Patricia Lockwood: Willa Cather’s Substance, 2 April 2026

The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop 
by Garrett Peck.
New Mexico, 309 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 8263 6925 3
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Death Comes for the Archbishop 
by Willa Cather.
Everyman, 344 pp., £16.99, October 2025, 978 1 85715 089 6
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... racked by the notion that he may not be free to follow his calling.He was standing in a tip-tilted green field among his native mountains, and he was trying to give consolation to a young man who was being torn in two before his eyes by the desire to go and the necessity to stay. He was trying to forge a new Will in that devout and exhausted priest; and the ...

Aphrodite bends over Stalin

John Lloyd, 4 April 1996

... from one of his fellow victims the story of how, in order to induce a good mood in a visiting Henry Kissinger, the Soviet leadership dresses two other ‘volunteers’ up in bearskins to pose as easy targets for their guest to bag. Failing to hit them even at close range, an enraged Kissinger falls upon one ‘bear’, wounds it mortally with a knife ...

The Cow Bells of Kitale

Patrick Collinson: The Selwyn Affair, 5 June 2003

... of the prisoners needed to go to the native hospital. As Keyen’s condition worsened, the DC, Henry Izard, was ‘pulled out of the Club’ to record his dying deposition; the Selwyns were also present.Helen Selwyn’s trial would focus on a matter of fact and a matter of judgment. Why did Keyen die on 25 June, from what causes, immediate and remote? And ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... kept a ‘black oak shop’ in Dublin.) William fully acknowledged his illegitimate son, known as Henry Wilson, who became a doctor, working closely with his father, and wrote the first book in English on ophthalmoscopy. Even at the height of Victoria’s rule, the Wildes and Butt were able to flout the rules of sexual morality, thanks in part to their ...

Devotion to the Cut

Adam Thirlwell: Gertrude Stein makes it plain, 25 September 2025

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 472 pp., £20, May, 978 0 571 36931 7
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... is one of the innumerable riffs in Stein which show off her love of discriminations – as though Henry James’s intelligence has acquired a manic style – but it’s also a demonstration of an unstated theory. According to this theory, all artistic work needs to be placed within its properly domestic sphere. ‘I began with Fernande and then there were ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
by Lance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
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... scarcely read the newspapers, relying on a press summary prepared for her by her spokesman Henry James, a career civil servant who had worked for both Heath and Wilson and was as grave and imposing a figure as his literary namesake. When James was succeeded by Bernard Ingham, who had worked for Barbara Castle, presentation certainly hotted up. Ingham ...

All the Sad Sages

Ferdinand Mount: Bagehot, 6 February 2014

Memoirs of Walter Bagehot 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 207 pp., £18.99, August 2013, 978 0 300 19554 5
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... few stray bons mots about the monarchy, some connection with the Economist (which keeps his memory green in the pseudonym of a regular columnist) – that is as much as most of us can dredge up. What precisely was he great as: essayist, critic, economist, political analyst? Well, not really any of them under a rigorous definition of those trades, but a bit of ...

Post-its, push pins, pencils

Jenny Diski: In the Stationery Cupboard, 31 July 2014

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace 
by Nikil Saval.
Doubleday, 288 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 385 53657 8
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... Box files. Sticky white circles to reinforce the holes made by paper punches. Paper punches. Green string tags to go through the holes. Labels. So many blank labels. White, coloured, all shapes and sizes. And a mechanical labeller with plastic tape to emboss. More than enough supplies so that if a thing is done wrongly, spoiled or not quite ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign countries and foreign languages’, a judgment partly founded in the belief that Grey’s only Continental trip had amounted to two glum days in Paris.The ...

Bush’s Choice

Tom Farer, 12 October 1989

... antagonism to Bush’s deliberate pace and prose. Like those establishment figures, epitomised by Henry Kissinger, who are the self-conscious heirs of the Anglo-European conservative tradition in foreign policy, with its emphasis on balance and order, liberal commentators were moved by a sensation of danger impending from a massive convulsion within the ...

Humans

Richard Poirier, 24 January 1985

Slow Learner 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 204 pp., £8.50, January 1985, 0 224 02283 0
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... and his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more ...