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... has an immense, obliterating power. One only has to look at the States and the way Jesse Jackson has picked up and hepped up the old Martin Luther King rhetoric to see the power of militant language. Jackson may be a self-advertising photo-opportunist, but he has the magic words, the political jive-talk, the ...

Newtopia

Christopher Hitchens, 24 August 1995

To Renew America 
by Newt Gingrich.
HarperCollins, 260 pp., £18, July 1995, 9780060173364
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... would be Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Sounded like a redneck to me, and a wondrous name withal. (Mark Stamaty, best of Washington cartoonists, took to calling him ‘Congressman Hoot Salamander’.) I didn’t do much prep. As usual, the proceedings opened with the charge that I was ignorant of the lessons of Munich. Generally, the other side didn’t know ...

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
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A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
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... his tendency to bluntness. His criticisms of Kenyatta’s development plans were often on the mark. He anticipated the catastrophes created by unregulated capital and proposed instead the melding of free market and communalism in land co-operatives. But accurate criticism was not the path to power. Barack found he could not play the fool to curry favour ...

It’s a Crime!

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1994

Chaim Soutine: Catalogue Raisonné, Vols I-II 
by Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls.
Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 780 pp., £49.99, December 1993, 3 8228 1629 9
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... have a life of its own, the greater the distortion of form which takes place. A brush stroke is a mark; it is also the action which makes the mark. The marks are the painting – its physical substance. The sequence of actions is its history. This curious feature of painting – that it is capable of carrying the history of ...

How to make a Greek god smile

Lorraine Daston, 10 June 1999

Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences 
by Philip Fisher.
Harvard, 191 pp., £21.95, January 1999, 0 674 95561 7
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... react with that special kind of relief reserved for moments of illumination, when an exclamation mark replaces a question mark: eureka! Each step in a geometric proof, each generalisation that connects singulars unexpectedly into a class detonates its own miniature surprise. According to Fisher, the reader who has followed ...

That’s America

Stephen Greenblatt, 29 September 1988

‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 366 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 520 05937 9
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... the international Communist conspiracy. It could be argued, against Rogin, that these three phases mark quite distinct institutional and psychological structures in American experience, just as a more optimistic account of the history of the United States would insist upon a counter-tradition of democratic openness and tolerance. But in a series of powerful ...

At the Barbican

T.J. Clark: Lee Krasner, 15 August 2019

... The Prophecy pictures were made in tragic circumstances. By 1956 Krasner’s marriage to Jackson Pollock was all but broken. In August that year, while Krasner was in Europe, Pollock’s Oldsmobile came off the road at speed, killing himself and Edith Metzger, a friend of his lover, Ruth Kligman. Kligman survived the crash. The paintings Krasner made ...

Crowing

Michael Rogin, 5 September 1996

Imagineering Atlanta 
by Charles Rutheiser.
Verso, 324 pp., £44.95, July 1996, 1 85984 800 1
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... Martin Luther King Jr and Coca-Cola. Seen through Rutheiser’s ironic, cold eye these nodes mark the fault lines of a disintegrative urban history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...

Ducking

Tim Flannery: When the British met the Australians, 15 December 2005

Dancing with Strangers: The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians 1788 
by Inga Clendinnen.
Canongate, 322 pp., £16.99, August 2005, 1 84195 616 3
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... On 25 January 1788, HMS Supply eased her way between the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon, proclaimed as ‘the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe’. The hyperbole was perhaps understandable, for the Britons were seeing Sydney Harbour through eyes wearied by months at sea, and this was to be their new home ...

Tinkering

Mark Greif: Walt Disney, 7 June 2007

Walt Disney: The Biography 
by Neal Gabler.
Aurum, 766 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 1 84513 277 4
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The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney 
by Michael Barrier.
California, 393 pp., £18.95, April 2007, 978 0 520 24117 6
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Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson 
by Tom Sito.
Kentucky, 440 pp., £19.95, September 2006, 0 8131 2407 7
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... to a deep admiration for handicraft (though never his own), conceived a ceramic Michael Jackson and chimp Bubbles and hired expert Italian artisans to fabricate it; the result is a centrepiece of the Broad Collection. He could never have executed such work himself; but it was his idea. Was Disney such an artist? Well, he wasn’t exactly like any of ...

Death for Elsie

Christopher Ricks, 7 August 1986

Found in the Street 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 277 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 9780434335244
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Private Papers 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 214 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 0 7011 2987 5
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... is a moment of suspended quotation which would have delighted both Dickens and his modern analyser Mark Lambert:     ‘Adulterer,’ Ralph said calmly, ‘and murderer’.     Sutherland said just as calmly, ‘Piss off or I’ll bust you wide open.’ Just as calmly, but not just as poisedly. Dignity’s preposterousness meets indignity’s ...

Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective

Eliot Weinberger: A Tale of Two Candidates, 3 July 2008

... On the final night of the relentless presidential primary campaign, Jesse Jackson compared Barack Obama’s victory to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Erica Jong compared Hillary Clinton’s defeat to watching Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Obama was in St Paul, Minnesota, pointedly in the very arena where the Republicans will hold their convention in September, at times barely audible over the nearly continual cheering of 17,000 fans (with another 15,000 listening outside ...

Oedipal Wrecks

Michael Mason, 26 March 1992

Fates Worse than Death 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 240 pp., £14.99, October 1991, 0 224 02918 5
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... Breakfast of Champions and reaching its nadir with Slaptick. D is, it must be said, a very low mark – and nothing short of abject when you give it to yourself. The first of these two novels actually wore on its sleeve the author’s doubt about its strengths, and his sense that he should push his work in some new direction. When I first encountered ...

Imagining an orgasm

Colin McGinn, 9 May 1991

Mind and Cognition: A Reader 
edited by William Lycan.
Blackwell, 683 pp., £14.95, April 1990, 0 631 16763 3
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Acts of Meaning 
by Jerome Bruner.
Harvard, 179 pp., £15.95, December 1990, 0 674 00360 8
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Modelling the mind 
edited by K.A. Mohyeldin Said.
Oxford, 216 pp., £25, August 1990, 9780198249733
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... the natural sciences: their business is Verstehen, not the expression of nomic regularities. One mark of this specialness is their essential involvement with normative notions – consistency, consequence, good reason – from which it follows that there can be no reduction of folk psychology to anything purged of the normative. This type of view is ...

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