Decay-Prone

Stephen Mulhall: The intolerance of liberalism, 22 July 2004

Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 413 pp., £19.95, April 2004, 0 691 09526 4
Show More
Show More
“... to a groundless hatred of one’s fellow human beings, and to a profoundly damaging mode of self-hatred. In short, disgust-based law underwrites a disgust with humanity as such. Nussbaum’s analysis of shame is more nuanced; she sees in its cognitive content a potentially affirmative moral and political role. Her account here relies more on ...”

The Undesired Result

Gillian Darley: Betjeman’s bêtes noires, 31 March 2005

Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 744 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7195 6495 6
Show More
Show More
“... Herefordshire hills. I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own. Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s self-portrait in blank verse, was published in 1960. As Hillier puts it, neatly: ‘John’s generation was given to premature ...”

Strenuously Modern

Rosemary Hill: At Home with the Stracheys, 3 March 2005

Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family 
by Barbara Caine.
Oxford, 488 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 19 925034 0
Show More
Show More
“... place in society in general carried out, as usual among the Stracheys, in a more high-pitched and self-conscious form, was the family’s departure from the monstrous house in Lancaster Gate. Richard Strachey had died in 1908, and the ‘crammed high hideous edifice’ where Lytton had read ‘the riddle of the Victorian age’ among the conversations in the ...”

Conflationism

Colin Burrow: ‘Hamlet’ as you like it, 21 June 2007

Hamlet 
edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor.
Arden, 613 pp., £8.99, March 2006, 1 904271 33 2
Show More
Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 
edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor.
Arden, 368 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 1 904271 80 2
Show More
‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet 
by Margreta de Grazia.
Cambridge, 267 pp., £17.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 69036 2
Show More
Show More
“... slaughter’. The editors at this point opt for F’s more orthodox Almighty who is opposed to ‘self-slaughter’, and the seals go to’t. Somewhere in all this is a larger perplexity in our thinking about Hamlet, and in our ways of thinking about texts historically. We want a text that is pluralistic and open to infinite reinterpretation, that can be ...”

Jowls are available

Jenny Diski: ‘Second Life’, 8 February 2007

“... the virtual world out, just as I have done for much of my real life. Though, of course, my fantasy self couldn’t actually read my unreal book because an avatar doesn’t read or do anything, being entirely dependent on the will and brainpower of a real self out here in First Life directing it. I had hopes of there being ...”

Moguls

J. Hoberman: Did the Jews invent Hollywood?, 7 March 2002

Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War Two 
by Steven Alan Carr.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £42.50, July 2001, 9780521798549
Show More
Show More
“... of the quintessential Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (a book that was itself accused of a self-directed anti-semitism). To be anti-Hollywood has also, at various times, been a way to enlist the rhetoric of anti-semitism to express sentiments that are anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-New Deal, anti-internationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or ...”

Over Several Tops

Bernard Porter: Winston Churchill, 14 January 2002

Churchill: A Study in Greatness 
by Geoffrey Best.
Hambledon, 370 pp., £19.95, May 2001, 1 85285 253 4
Show More
Churchill 
by Roy Jenkins.
Macmillan, 1002 pp., £30, October 2001, 0 333 78290 9
Show More
Show More
“... buoyant one – which compounded even his new comrades’ distrust of him. He seemed to have a self-destructive streak. From early on, we are told, he was convinced that he was a man of destiny, invulnerable to bullets both literally (in his early military adventures) and metaphorically; but that was no reason, surely, to put himself in the path of so many ...”

A Spot of Firm Government

Terry Eagleton: Claude Rawson, 23 August 2001

God, Gulliver and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination 1492-1945 
by Claude Rawson.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, June 2001, 0 19 818425 5
Show More
Show More
“... with which he is covertly complicit, he writes scornfully of ‘the indignant diatribes of self-righteous post-colonial censors’, perhaps a necessary disowning of the voguish for a book which includes a chapter devoted to the protuberant buttocks and plump, pendulous or sagging breasts to be found in representations of female savages. Despite these ...”

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
Show More
Show More
“... to subvert the unexamined shibboleths of the British state. For the Union of 1707 is far from self-explanatory. The Union of the Parliaments in 1707 followed a century after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the Scottish royal line had succeeded to the English throne. This loose personal union preserved separate Scottish and English kingdoms, which ...”

Monasteries into Motorways

Isabel Hilton: The Destruction of Lhasa, 7 September 2006

Lhasa: Streets with Memories 
by Robert Barnett.
Columbia, 219 pp., £16, March 2006, 0 231 13680 3
Show More
Show More
“... who might be trying to say something that Barnett fails to understand. These episodes are told self-deprecatingly – a narrative of successive misperceptions, the consequences of which are understood only after it is too late. Foreigners, Barnett is telling us in the course of this extended self-criticism, can rarely ...”

Deadad

Iain Sinclair: On the Promenade, 17 August 2006

“... without ever coming into focus. In a daze of refracted marine light, they find themselves, these self-hypnotised actors, in the same De Chirico painting: interior as exterior. Sleepwalkers sunburned on one side. Magically, they avoid collisions. They float towards no particular destination, with no motive beyond movement itself; a beating of the bounds. The ...”

Is Berlusconi finished?

Paul Ginsborg: The Italian Election, 6 April 2006

“... other factor helps to explain why Italy is a country of the centre-right. It is the home of the self-employed, more so than any other country in Europe. Small shops have survived and even prospered in a way that would be quite unimaginable in Northern Europe or North America. Family firms have played the crucial role in the construction of industrial ...”

No Law at All

Stephen Sedley: The Governor Eyre Affair, 2 November 2006

A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law 
by R.W. Kostal.
Oxford, 529 pp., £79.95, December 2005, 0 19 826076 8
Show More
Show More
“... to call Eyre and his officers to account. The imperatives of empire were too potent to admit the self-examination which a prosecution would have involved and the self-doubt which a conviction would have entailed. What the controversy nevertheless exposed and articulated was the deep discomfort among both supporters and ...”

Small America

Michael Peel: A report from Liberia, 7 August 2003

“... to the billboards put up by the authorities in an attempt to create an atmosphere of national self-improvement. ‘Be your brother’s keeper,’ one urges. ‘Total reconciliation before 2024.’ Others instruct a dispossessed public – the Red Cross estimates 80 per cent of the population has been displaced by the fighting – to go back and farm the ...”

Prophetic Chattiness

Patrick McGuinness: Victor Hugo, 19 June 2003

The Distance, The Shadows: Selected Poems 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Harry Guest.
Anvil, 250 pp., £12.95, November 2002, 0 85646 345 0
Show More
Selected Poetry 
by Victor Hugo, translated by Steven Monte.
Carcanet, 305 pp., £12.95, September 2001, 1 85754 539 7
Show More
Selected Poems of Victor Hugo: A Bilingual Edition 
edited by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore.
Chicago, 631 pp., £24.50, April 2001, 0 226 35980 8
Show More
Show More
“... the 1848 Revolution as a ‘parody’ of 1793 in which the guillotine ‘plagiarised’ its former self; the Revolution of 1793, acted out by men, was mimicked in 1848 by monkeys. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire draws on similar metaphors of repetition and parody, though Marx had little time for Hugo’s Châtiments because ‘Hugo contents himself with bitterly ...”