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Educating the planet

Frank Kermode, 20 March 1980

... of Meaning. Ogden was at the time editing a weekly paper, The Cambridge Magazine. Its circulation rose to 25,000 and the only way he could solve the paper shortage was to buy books in bulk and pulp them – not, however, before he had looked through them. Ogden believed in being reasonable if he could find a reasonable auditor (‘Will you change your mind if ...

A Country Emptied

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 30410 5
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... crofters who were rapidly growing in number – the population of the Western Isles, for example, rose by 80 per cent between 1755 and 1821. But while the cottar might move to a nearby town or village to work in the burgeoning textile industry, or enter the new waged economy as a farm labourer, the crofter in the remote north-west had nowhere to go. Instead ...

Flight to the Forest

Richard Lloyd Parry: Bruno Manser Vanishes, 24 October 2019

The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure 
by Carl Hoffman.
William Morrow, 347 pp., £14.74, March 2019, 978 0 06 243905 5
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... another well-established move for a Swiss hippie – dropped out to become an Alpine herdsman. He rose at four every morning, milking cows, making cheese, learning to weld, lay bricks, keep bees and stitch his own lederhosen. After four years he tired of cows and moved on to sheep. In the mountains he began the diaries, accompanied by beautiful and meticulous ...

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All 
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8
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... its outcome. After the screening, Herzog was to recall, the two thousand people in the audience ‘rose up with a single voice in an angry roar’ to denounce him for aestheticising the evidence of destruction. Relishing the palpable hostility, he proceeded to claim Dante, Goya, Breughel and Bosch as his models, before concluding with the observation that ...

Baudelairean

Mary Hawthorne: The Luck of Walker Evans, 5 February 2004

Walker Evans 
by James Mellow.
Perseus, 654 pp., £15.99, February 2002, 1 903985 13 7
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... enough); in any case, his writing didn’t take off, and he gave it up. He had taken snapshots in France, and, almost by accident, he took up the camera again, making abstract pictures of New York street scenes and portraits of his friends. ‘Oh yes,’ he said years later of these beginnings, ‘I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat ...

Made by the Revolution

Perry Anderson: Mao’s Right Hand, 12 September 2024

Zhou Enlai: A Life 
by Chen Jian.
Harvard, 817 pp., £29.95, May, 978 0 674 65958 2
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... who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him. Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when ...

Market Forces and Malpractice

James Meek: The Housing Crisis, 4 July 2024

... these second-hand clothes, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, have a few labels marked ‘made in France’ and ‘made in USA’, but were overwhelmingly produced in the same countries as now, places like Mexico, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh. Manchester’s deindustrialisation is an old story now. I was reminded of Engels’s description of the way the ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable.’ In January 1891, six months after the magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and three months before it came out in book form, Constance ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay. If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’ A memory of the three brothers all playing ...
... entered the land of the Inquisition. As in all other inquisitions, the sun remained neutral. It rose and its light illuminated balconies decorated with Nazi banners. It was the Führer’s 47th birthday. I forgot to mention that all this occurred during the intermediary days of Passover. I don’t recall if we rode the same train the whole way or if we ...

Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... After a brilliant academic start – he became professor of Greek at Sydney in 1937 aged 25 – he rose in the war to the rank of brigadier without ever seeing action (something about which he always felt guilty). In 1945, he voted Labour as a protest against Appeasement. In 1950, he became a Tory MP. By 1955, he was a junior Treasury minister. In 1958, he ...

Diary

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: The Turkish Left, 8 August 2013

... and fight.’ When the police fired the first volley of tear gas, three white columns of smoke rose, and drifted silently across the square. Then the smell hit and kicked hard, somewhere between nostrils, eyes and stomach. A small woman in her mid-fifties leaned back against a bus stop outside a brothel, calmly smoking. Two young men sat on the pavement ...

Not My Fault

John Lanchester: New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs, 17 July 2008

Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography 
by Cherie Blair.
Little, Brown, 421 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 4087 0098 3
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Prezza, My Story: Pulling No Punches 
by John Prescott, with Hunter Davies.
Headline, 405 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 0 7553 1775 2
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A Question of Honour: Inside New Labour and the True Story of the Cash for Peerages Scandal 
by Michael Levy.
Simon and Schuster, 310 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 84737 315 1
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... brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a fortune after drifting into show business by starting a record label. Those ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... a year before the old life so shockingly blew away – I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of ...

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