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Diary

Neal Ascherson: On A.J.P. Taylor, 2 June 1983

... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a ...

The Idea of America

Alasdair MacIntyre, 6 November 1980

Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 398 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 485 11201 9
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... is far less important than some have insisted. The Jefferson of the Declaration was, in fact, a close disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment, influenced by Reid, Smith, Hume, and above all by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century ...

Fit and Few

Donald Davie, 3 May 1984

The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 30632 5
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... Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English poets who normally trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns and ...

The Balboan View

Kenneth Silverman: Alfred Kinsey, 7 May 1998

Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life 
by James Jones.
Norton, 937 pp., £28, October 1997, 0 393 04086 0
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... satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing time of saloons. No swearing, drinking, dancing or masturbation. A loner, young Alfred found some ...

For the Good of Our Health

Andrew Saint: The Spread of Suburbia, 6 April 2006

Sprawl: A Compact History 
by Robert Bruegmann.
Chicago, 301 pp., £17.50, January 2006, 0 226 07690 3
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... simpler to build there. Everyday facilities of shopping and schooling are generally available close by, while jobs are not too far away (since the 1950s more than half of American industry has been sited outside old city centres). All this, say sprawl’s opponents, comes at an unaffordable expense in infrastructure, and destroys land which has vital ...

I am the Watchman

Linda Colley: William Cobbett, forerunner of the Sun, 20 November 2003

William Cobbett: Selected Writings 
edited by Leonora Nattrass.
Pickering & Chatto, 2312 pp., £495, December 1998, 1 85196 375 8
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Rural rides 
by William Cobbett, edited by Ian Dyck.
Penguin, 576 pp., £9.99, September 2001, 0 14 043579 4
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... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that ...

Taking Refuge in the Loo

Leland de la Durantaye: Peter Handke, 22 May 2014

Versuch über den Pilznarren: Eine Geschichte für sich 
by Peter Handke.
Suhrkamp, 217 pp., £14.70, September 2013, 978 3 518 42383 7
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Peter Handke im Gespräch, mit Hubert Patterer und Stefan Winkler 
Kleine Zeitung, 120 pp., £15.36, November 2012, 978 3 902819 14 7Show More
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... with a living writer, and yet another difficulty is introduced when the writer’s work is as close to life as Handke’s is. The line separating fact from fiction often disappears in his books. The blend of fact and fiction is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was ...

After Mubarak

Adam Shatz, 17 February 2011

... man in Cairo: ‘family’, as Hillary Clinton put it. (The Clinton and Mubarak families have been close for years.) So long as he opened the economy to multinationals, achieved high growth rates and honoured his foreign policy commitments – allowing swift passage for US warships through the Suez Canal, interrogating radical Islamists kidnapped by the CIA as ...

Fronds and Tenrils

Helen Vendler: Mark Ford, 29 November 2001

Soft Sift 
by Mark Ford.
Faber, 42 pp., £7.99, May 2001, 0 571 20781 2
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... Ford said in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (spring 2001). The lyrics in Soft Sift often come close to being strayed sonnets. Like many modern poets, from Yeats to Ashbery, Ford writes poems that don’t keep to 14 lines, but that nonetheless feel like sonnets. Here is a typical 12-line example, from a sequence called ‘Inside’, embodying a terrified ...

So Amused

Sarah Rigby: Fay Weldon, 11 July 2002

Auto da Fay 
by Fay Weldon.
Flamingo, 366 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 9780007109920
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... and coincidences that have influenced her life. Writing an autobiography is, she says, as close to a summing up, ‘a day of judgment’ when ‘the meaning of events is made clear,’ as she expects to come. In effect what she is doing, as she acknowledges, is trying to treat her own life in the way that she has treated fictional lives: to find a ...

More than ever, and for ever

Michael Rogin: Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, 17 September 1998

Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gollancz, 624 pp., £25, August 1998, 0 575 06590 7
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America Day by Day 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman.
California, 355 pp., $27.50, January 1999, 0 520 20979 6
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... Although often assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of ...

Beyond Textualism

Christopher Norris, 19 January 1984

Text Production 
by Michael Riffaterre, translated by Terese Lyons.
Columbia, 341 pp., $32.50, September 1983, 0 231 05334 7
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Writing and the Experience of Limits 
by Philippe Sollers, edited by David Hayman, translated by Philip Barnard.
Columbia, 242 pp., $31.50, September 1983, 0 231 05292 8
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The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory 
by Paul Fry.
Yale, 239 pp., £18, October 1984, 0 300 02924 1
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Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 
by Paul de Man, edited by Wlad Godzich.
Methuen, 308 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 416 35860 8
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Displacement: Derrida and After 
edited by Mark Krupnick.
Indiana, 198 pp., £9.75, December 1983, 0 253 31803 3
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Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre 
by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Columbia, 299 pp., £39, August 1983, 0 231 05492 0
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... interpretative ends. The literary text, for Riffaterre, is an object of patient and erudite close-reading, a ‘monument’ whose utterly distinctive character the critic sets out to describe and explain. At bottom, there is not much difference between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ...

An Element of Unfairness

Ross McKibbin: The Great Education Disaster, 3 July 2008

... Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an academic discipline close to those of the grammar schools. They are popular with many middle-class parents, who often get religion when they start thinking about their children’s education. But faith schools are inherently divisive: that is their function. And their admissions ...

Back from the Underworld

Marina Warner: The Liveliness of the Dead, 17 August 2017

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Princeton, 711 pp., £27.95, October 2015, 978 0 691 15778 8
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... didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to close down (almost) indulgences and remission of sins, but the liveliness of the dead in their claims on us and their presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental ...

What the Romans did

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 5 February 1987

English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman 
by C.O. Brink.
James Clark, 243 pp., £11.95, February 1986, 0 227 67872 9
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Latin Poets and Roman Life 
by Jasper Griffin.
Duckworth, 226 pp., £24, January 1986, 0 7156 1970 5
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The Mirror of Myth: Classical Themes and Variations 
by Jasper Griffin.
Faber, 144 pp., £15, February 1986, 0 571 13805 5
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... date than used to be supposed. From the end of the Hannibalic Wars, when Rome was thrown into close contact with Greeks in Italy and in the Greek territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Roman upper classes took over the whole Greek apparatus for creating the amenities of life. Not only literature and art but ...

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