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Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this ...

Holland’s Empire

V.G. Kiernan, 17 August 1989

Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 
by Jonathan Israel.
Oxford, 462 pp., £45, June 1989, 0 19 822729 9
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... put a premium on managerial ingenuity. House rents and food, on the other hand, were costly; and Jan den Tex’s Oldenbarnevelt brings out the fact that taxation was tailored, as in all well-regulated states, to fall disproportionately on the poor. It may be regretted that Israel does not tell us more about labour conditions – for example, in the vast ...

Self-Made Women

John Sutherland, 11 July 1991

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present 
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990, 0 7134 5848 8
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The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991, 0 8142 0518 6
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... lines of predilection. Sappho gets in, but not Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw ...

Thank you for your letter

Anthony Grafton: Latin, 1 November 2001

Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the 16th to the 20th Centuries 
by Françoise Waquet, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 346 pp., £20, July 2001, 1 85984 615 7
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... they deplored the low levels attained in most classical schools. Educational reformers such as Jan Amos Comenius and Enlightenment thinkers such as Helvétius held that schools based on drudgery and dead languages could have no other results. The professionals, for their part, insisted – generation after generation – that once upon a time, things had ...

Damn all

Scott Malcomson, 23 September 1993

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America 
by Robert Hughes.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.95, June 1993, 0 19 507676 1
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... come in for slagging.) Yet we also hear that many artists Hughes admires couldn’t draw well. Mark Rothko has ‘severe limitations as a draughts man’, as does Milton Avery; David Smith is ‘very uneven’, Magritte straightforwardly poor. Hughes’s tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian ...

What is the burglar after?

T.J. Clark: Painting the Poem, 6 October 2022

... immense middle road laid out by the Dutch in the 17th century. When he first saw the canvases of Jan van Goyen, he tells us,I felt I had waited an age for just this painter, that he filled a gap in the museum of my imagination I had sensed for a long time. It was accompanied by an irrational conviction that I knew him well and for ever … A road through a ...

Getting the Ick

John Kerrigan: Consent in Shakespeare, 14 December 2023

Shakespeare on Consent 
by Amanda Bailey.
Routledge, 197 pp., £17.99, March, 978 0 367 18453 7
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Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook 
edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman.
Cambridge, 421 pp., £95, January, 978 1 108 84340 9
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Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion 
by Bradley J. Irish.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £75, March, 978 1 350 21398 2
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... Tarquin’s deed is ‘black’. Bailey reproduces a painting by the 16th-century Flemish artist Jan Sanders van Hemessen of a dark-featured Tarquin with curly black hair grabbing a snow-white Lucrece. Opposite is an image by Artemisia Gentileschi (c.1650) of a black slave looking on while Tarquin attacks Lucrece with a dagger. Did early readers assume, when ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...

Mandelson’s Pleasure Dome

Iain Sinclair, 2 October 1997

... card-carrying Cockneys, a way out, a trip into the unknown. Musician and long-distance pedestrian Jan Wobble recalls his sabbatical as a minicabber, ferrying striped faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
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... into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you worms?” ’ All three critics share the comforting belief that, au fond, the artist is great because he is morally commendable. This is sentimental in two important respects. It undervalues skill and ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the first day, we hid in the Mins’ka metro station with our dog, Zlata. The ...

The European (Re)discovery of the Shamans

Carlo Ginzburg, 28 January 1993

... evoked rather than named directly, steadily entered the religious history of humanity in order to mark its poorest, most elementary stage. Thus Europeans discovered shamans thanks to the Russian Empire’s expansion towards the east. Or rediscovered them. This clarification seems to me appropriate for two reasons. First, between the 16th and 17th centuries ...

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

... occupants as simply a provision for his own support & enjoyment!’ The facetious exclamation mark doesn’t even begin to disguise his anxiety about what was going on back home in his presently fatherless family.Only after all these issues have been addressed in detail does Peter get around to what is chiefly on his mind:If, for a time, we stand still or ...

Those Brogues

Marina Warner, 6 October 2016

... uppers, dances the bread rolls like shoes and eats his boot, twirling the laces like spaghetti; Jan Švankmajer, the Czech surrealist and filmmaker, has animated shoes as wide-open cannibal mouths. I’d claim there’s a deeper affinity between the way you’re shod and the way you talk and who you are: that a brogue is an under-ear ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... Furman of Russia, Gáspár Tamás of Hungary and Slavoj Žižek of Yugoslavia, born in the 1940s; Jan Zielonka of Poland, born in the 1950s; and Ivan Krastev of Bulgaria in the 1960s.1 All save Zielonka were originally trained in philosophy, which – this being Eastern Europe – was no impediment to wider interests: Furman started his career as a historian ...

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