I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas 
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0
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... the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God.What about​ Weil’s ideas? There is no disputing their importance. Her thinking about ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... engaged in these efforts later became prominent members of the new Irish state’s diplomatic service. Joe Walshe, for example, who was Secretary of the Department of External Affairs from 1922 until 1946; Michael MacWhite, who had served in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War and was Irish Permanent Representative to the League of Nations in ...

Peeping Tam

Karl Miller, 6 August 1981

... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...
... Sun. (At least this was Rowland’s version of what was happening – Murdoch has denied it.) Robert Maxwell is trying to buy a 10 per cent share in Fleet Holdings from the, Australian tycoon Robert Holmes a Court for £15.4 million, while another bidder – it’s not clear whether or not he is a rival to Maxwell ...

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow

David Runciman: After the Nation State, 6 June 2002

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Allen Lane, 960 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7139 9616 1
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Reordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of 11 September 
edited by Mark Leonard.
Foreign Policy Centre, 124 pp., £9.95, March 2002, 1 903558 10 7
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... The nation-state had been forged (most notably by Bismarck in Germany) to place the state in the service of the nation, and was at root a welfare state, in the sense that its legitimacy depended on its ability to better the welfare of its citizens. The Long War was fought between the proponents of what were initially three different visions of national ...

Pound’s Friends

Donald Davie, 23 May 1985

Pound’s Cantos 
by Peter Makin.
Allen and Unwin, 349 pp., £20, March 1985, 0 04 811001 9
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To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos 
by Christine Froula.
Yale, 208 pp., £18.50, February 1985, 0 300 02512 2
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Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing 
by Peter Nicholls.
Macmillan, 263 pp., £25, September 1984, 0 333 36159 8
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... the rain. Unfair that we neither know nor care that the author of ‘O Worship the King’ was Robert Grant (1785-1838). Grant’s virtual anonymity is the clearest proof that he has entered into the folk-memory, his verses remembered or half-remembered by those who neither know nor care – nor need they – what it is they remember. And who can ...

Left with a Can Opener

Thomas Jones: Homer in Bijelo Polje, 7 October 2021

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 320 pp., £28.95, April 2021, 978 0 525 52094 8
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... of illness. She grew up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grandfather owned a department store (Robert Kanigel describes him as ‘a force in the local Jewish community and a major philanthropist’). Her mother thought the Californian climate would help Marian recover from Spanish flu – and also wanted to enrol at the university herself. Marian’s ...

The Last Georgian

John Bayley, 13 June 1991

Edmund Blunden: A Biography 
by Barry Webb.
Yale, 360 pp., £18.50, December 1990, 0 300 04634 0
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... at the end of ‘Report on Experience’ was sincere. Blunden and Sassoon were furious when Robert Graves published in 1929 Goodbye to All That. Blunden’s comments are of great significance, and deserve to be taken seriously as evidence of what men who loathed the war, and had been through a great deal of it, actually felt and continued to feel. Very ...

Members Only

R.B. Dobson, 24 February 1994

The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386-1421 
edited by J.S. Roskell, Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe.
Alan Sutton, 3500 pp., £275, February 1993, 9780862999438
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... membership of Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those ...

Something to Do

David Cannadine, 23 September 1993

Witness of a Century: The Life and Times of Prince Arthur of Connaught, 1850-1942 
by Noble Frankland.
Shepheard-Walwyn, 476 pp., £22.95, June 1993, 0 85683 136 0
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... is here revealed for the first time. But his relations with the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, were mostly cordial, his term of office was generally deemed a success, and he and his wife returned to Britain in 1915 amidst near-universal feelings of appreciation and regret. By then the Duke was 66, and Queen Victoria’s only surviving ...

Memoriousness

E.S. Turner, 15 September 1988

Memories of Times Past 
by Louis Heren.
Hamish Hamilton, 313 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 241 12427 1
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Chances: An Autobiography 
by Mervyn Jones.
Verso, 311 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 86091 167 5
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... In the course of a feud with Number 10 he decided to sue Harold Wilson and the head of the Civil Service for denying the newspaper the usual advance copies of the Honours List. ‘I did not have a watertight legal case,’ he admits, but counsel were engaged and a vacation judge was alerted. If Number 10 had not caved in it would have been a fine comedy ...

A Potent Joy

E.S. Turner, 4 July 1985

Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s 
by Norman Longmate.
Hutchinson, 423 pp., £13.95, May 1985, 0 09 158820 0
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... of kills at only 3 to 10 per cent of targets engaged. Other experts were more pessimistic; Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the radar authority, rated the chances of interception at a thousand to one. Nevertheless, according to Long-mate, operational trials were conducted and began to look promising. By that time, fortunately, the launching-sites had been destroyed ...

Death for Elsie

Christopher Ricks, 7 August 1986

Found in the Street 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 277 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 9780434335244
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Private Papers 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 214 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 0 7011 2987 5
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... one), is dead-set for success, garish and enslaved, in the world of glossy modelling and of lip-service to art, an underworld of unreality which comes on as the overworld. Highsmith’s anger, dismay and pity at such a world, and particularly at what it does to human decision, choice, and therefore reality, are precipitated by the conditions which Eliot ...

Godmother of the Salmon

John Bayley, 9 July 1992

‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ and other Laureate Poems 
by Ted Hughes.
Faber, 64 pp., £12.99, June 1992, 0 571 16605 9
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... This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order ... The service helps to keep capitalism going, but more importantly it feeds the poet’s fancy: at a time of waiting for the end, with the slump (now called recession) seemingly endless, the pylons ‘trailing dead high-tension wires’, the Germans re-arming – at ...

Shop Talk

John Lennard, 27 January 1994

Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses 
by Walter Nash.
Blackwell, 214 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 9780631180630
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... truth Mendacious by default. The phrase was invented, and its applications demonstrated, by Sir Robert Armstrong (now Lord Armstrong), Secretary to the [British] Cabinet and Head of the Secret Service, who when called as a witness in an Australian court, in the course of the so-called ‘Spycatcher’ trial, would not ...