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The Manchu Conquest

Jonathan Spence, 7 August 1986

The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in 17th-Century China 
by Frederic Wakeman.
California, 736 pp., £63.75, January 1986, 0 520 04804 0
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... Southern Ming politics are a quagmire, and Wakeman is not always clear in presenting them. The post-conquest Manchu regent Dorgon, shrewd though he was, emerges here as a paragon, as does Emperor Shunzhi after he took personal power. Both men need more highly nuanced study if they are to be fully understood. (One should maybe emphasise that the ...

Gray’s Elegy

Jonathan Coe, 8 October 1992

Poor Things 
by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 7475 1246 9
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... parody like this will be worth any amount of the over-careful realism practised in more solemn post-imperial novels.Not all of the treatment is facetious. Duncan Thaw remarks in Lanark that ‘if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively,’ and just as Gray’s novels to date have enormously enriched the ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS version of Britain. Beyond the ...

Saint Terence

Jonathan Bate, 23 May 1991

Ideology: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Verso, 242 pp., £32.50, May 1991, 0 86091 319 8
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... still firmly Marxist at base, but has a more flexible superstructure shaped by various brands of Post-Structuralism, most notably Deconstruction, feminism and, latterly, the carnivalesque of Bakhtin. But in fact there are three phases, roughly divisible according to decade, and the first of these, which Eagleton has persistently suppressed in interviews and ...

I wouldn’t say I love Finland

Alexander Dziadosz: Love, Home, Country?, 24 March 2022

Voices of the Lost 
by Hoda Barakat, translated by Marilyn Booth.
Oneworld, 197 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 78607 722 6
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God 99 
by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright.
Comma, 278 pp., £9.99, November 2020, 978 1 905583 77 5
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... see the would-be recipients, waiting for messages that will never arrive, and then a postman at a post office, stranded by war. He sorts and reads the letters that have amassed, ‘like the piles of dead leaves spilling over the kerbs at the corners of deserted streets’. Hassan Blasim’s God 99 is a less disciplined undertaking. Like Barakat, who left ...

Chinese Leaps

Jon Elster, 25 April 1991

The Search for Modern China 
by Jonathan Spence.
Hutchinson, 876 pp., £19.95, May 1990, 0 09 174472 5
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Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1880s to the 1980s 
by Jack Gray.
Oxford, 456 pp., £35, April 1990, 0 19 913076 0
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... and soil impose perennial constraints on warfare and agriculture. A striking example is found in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China: ‘Chiang Kai-shek [in 1949] had roughly the same range of options that had faced the southern Ming court once the Manchus had seized Peking and the North China plain 305 years before. He could try to consolidate a ...

But this is fateful!

Theo Tait: Jonathan Lethem, 16 March 2017

The Blot: A Novel 
by Jonathan Lethem.
Cape, 289 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 0 224 10148 6
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The Blot 
by Jonathan Lethem and Laurence Rickels.
Anti-Oedipus, 88 pp., £6.99, September 2016, 978 0 9905733 7 1
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... Trying to make sense​ of Jonathan Lethem’s fiction as a whole is something of a fool’s errand: there is no easily discernible line from the early hipster science fiction to his big-selling detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), to his Cobble Hill coming-of-age novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his intricate, ironic New York Buddenbrooks, Dissident Gardens (2013 ...

Culler and Deconstruction

Gerald Graff, 3 September 1981

The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction 
by Jonathan Culler.
Routledge, 256 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 7100 0757 4
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... the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek. Amidst this swirl of publicity and controversy, Jonathan Culler has managed to remain calm long enough to write a reasoned defence of deconstruction, one from which both scholars and general readers will be able to learn a good deal. Culler is fairly termed an apologist for the ...

Strenuous Unbelief

Jonathan Rée: Richard Rorty, 15 October 1998

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America 
by Richard Rorty.
Harvard, 107 pp., £12.50, May 1998, 9780674003118
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Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. III 
by Richard Rorty.
Cambridge, 355 pp., £40, June 1998, 0 521 55347 4
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... of Descartes and the inanity of Carnap, but with their inspiration Rorty began to advocate a post-philosophical culture in which everyone would accept that knowledge has count less varieties, all suited to different human purposes, and none intrinsically superior to any other. In the new democratic order we would realise that there are no magic skyhooks ...

Cry Treedom

Jonathan Bate, 4 November 1993

Forests: The shadow of Civilisation 
by Robert Pogue Harrison.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 226 31806 0
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... managed: ‘One of the ways in which this dream of mastery and possession becomes reality in the post-Christian era is through the rise of forest management during the late-18th and 19th centuries.’ Trees were planted with Cartesian precision, in straight lines. Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees tells of an 18th-century nobleman who climbed a ...

Duffers

Jonathan Parry, 21 September 1995

The City of London. Vol. II: Golden Years, 1890-1914 
by David Kynaston.
Chatto, 678 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7011 3385 6
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... rates of interest to the fundholders who had financed the war. Taxpayers suffered badly in the post-war depression, and William Cobbett led a bitter national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed ...

Mend and Extend

Jonathan Rée: Ernst Cassirer’s Curiosity, 18 November 2021

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 
by Ernst Cassirer, translated by Steve G. Lofts.
Routledge, 1412 pp., £150, September 2020, 978 1 138 90725 6
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... doctrine as ‘idealism’ will have put some readers off, but he understood the word in his own, post-classical way. Idealism in his sense implied, first, that human existence is thoroughly historical, in that the concepts, stories, schemes and emotions by which we set store are continuous cultural processes which got underway thousands of years ago and will ...

The Brothers Koerbagh

Jonathan Rée: The Enlightenment, 14 January 2002

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 
by Jonathan Israel.
Oxford, 810 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 19 820608 9
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... the 18th century and its over-investment in the power of reason. Postmodernism was nothing if not post-Enlightenment. The idea of the Enlightenment goes back to the 18th century itself, in particular to Kant and a miniature essay called ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ which he wrote in 1784. He started by acknowledging that we all have an ingrained desire to ...

Effing the Ineffable

Glen Newey: Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century by Jonathan Glover, 25 November 1999

Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century 
by Jonathan Glover.
Cape, 469 pp., £18.99, October 1999, 0 224 05240 3
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... look the odder it gets. There is, at least superficially, a limit to this. Facts, so belaboured by Post-Modernism, prove pertinacious in the face of atrocity. It’s notable that the dogma of social constructionism, lately so infarcted in cultural and literary studies, has had little to say about the creation of ‘the Holocaust’, long dignified with the ...

Cyber-Jihad

Charles Glass: What Osama Said, 9 March 2006

The Secret History of al-Qaida 
by Abdel Bari Atwan.
Saqi, 256 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 0 86356 760 6
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Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror 
by Michael Scheuer.
Potomac, 307 pp., £11.95, July 2005, 1 57488 862 5
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Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden 
edited by Bruce Lawrence, translated by James Howarth.
Verso, 292 pp., £10.99, November 2005, 1 84467 045 7
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Osama: The Making of a Terrorist 
by Jonathan Randal.
Tauris, 346 pp., £9.99, October 2005, 1 84511 117 6
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... in bin Laden’s modus operandi that would increase his media celebrity. The veteran Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, in his detailed and thoroughly researched biography Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, noted that in 1996 ‘he crossed the threshold from a war of words against Saudi Arabia and the United ...

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