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I am Prince Mishkin

Mark Ford, 23 April 1987

‘Howl’: Original Draft Facsimile 
by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Barry Miles.
Viking, 194 pp., £16.95, February 1987, 0 670 81599 3
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White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 
by Allen Ginsberg.
Viking, 89 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 670 81598 5
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... spirit appeared in his room in East Harlem and declaimed ‘The Sunflower’ and ‘The Sick Rose’ in an unearthly voice. A lot of people thought he’d gone mad. As late as 1952 he was hoping a new analyst would ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality and help him integrate into society. But in 1954 he moved to San Francisco where he found a new type of ...

At the Royal Academy

Jeremy Harding: Botticelli, 5 April 2001

Botticelli's Dante 
Royal Academy, 360 pp., £48, March 2001, 0 900946 85 7Show More
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... Christ and Gabriel stranded on the rim of a monumental blank which would have been the Celestial Rose. They are diminutive figures in a daunting emptiness created by large-scale erasures: proof that the Empyrean is beyond depiction or description. As for the preceding Canto, there is nothing at all. Botticelli took the parchment set aside for this ...

Confounding Malthus

Roy Porter, 21 December 1989

Health and the Rise of Civilisation 
by Mark Nathan Cohen.
Yale, 285 pp., £22.50, October 1989, 0 300 04006 7
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Nutrition and Economic Development in the 18th-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropomorphic History 
by John Komlos.
Princeton, 325 pp., $45, November 1989, 0 691 04257 8
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... To put it bluntly, have things been getting better or worse? It is not the least virtue of Mark Nathan Cohen’s revaluation of the ‘diseases of civilisation’ question that he does not push a simple solution. He offers a qualified pessimism about the past, and a question-mark for the future. Cultural anthropology ...

This is the new communism

Mark Philip Bradley: Modern Vietnam, 15 December 2016

The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam 
by Christopher Goscha.
Allen Lane, 634 pp., £30, June 2016, 978 1 84614 310 6
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... in 939 by planting sharp wooden stakes at low tide in the bed of the Red River. When the tide rose the stakes became invisible to the unsuspecting Chinese and impaled their armada. Heroism and guerrilla resistance became second nature to the Vietnamese and shaped their later opposition to French colonialism. Examples of patriotic resistance were used ...

One of Hitler’s Inflatables

Mark Mazower: Quisling, 20 January 2000

Quisling: A Study in Treachery 
by Hans Fredrik Dahl, translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £30, May 1999, 0 521 49697 7
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... New Order took shape. His old National Union was the only party permitted and its membership rose to a respectable figure for the first time. The Nuremberg race laws were introduced into Norway, and the clause in the original 1814 Constitution prohibiting Jews from entering the country was reintroduced after nearly a century. Taxes were levied to cover ...

History on Trial

Mark Elvin, 19 February 1981

... took her pleasure with the young actors and actresses of her revolutionary operas, or sprinkled a rose with water to photograph for her entranced American biographer, Professor Roxane Witke. Disgust with this sort of behaviour should not be mistaken for antifeminism (even if this also exists in some measure), as commentators like Dr Mirsky have tended to ...

He Tasks Me

Mark Ford: Marilynne Robinson, 9 October 2008

Home 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 325 pp., £16.99, September 2008, 978 1 84408 549 1
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... sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water – peaches and grapes are little more ...

Raiding Joyce

Denis Donoghue, 18 April 1985

James Joyce 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £20, November 1984, 9780521240147
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James Joyce and Sexuality 
by Richard Brown.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £19.50, March 1985, 0 521 24811 6
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Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation 
by Fritz Senn, edited by John Paul Riquelme.
Johns Hopkins, 225 pp., £22.20, December 1984, 0 8018 3135 0
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Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French 
edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780521266369
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... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...

Everyone, Then No One

David Nasaw: Where have all the bowler hats gone?, 23 February 2006

Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat 
by Neil Steinberg.
Granta, 342 pp., £12, August 2005, 1 86207 782 7
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... Almost from the moment Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency, he was lobbied by Alex Rose, a Democratic Party powerhouse and president of the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers’ International Union, to put on a hat, any hat: fedora, top hat, derby or homburg. Bowing perhaps to the pressure from the hatters or anxious to begin ...

At Dulwich

T.J. Clark: Poussin and Twombly, 25 August 2011

... gallery’s founders, and in the half-light among the sarcophagi is a Twombly sculpture: a black rose resting on a marble pebble resting on a box covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though ...

Bird-man swallows human

David Craig: Birds’ Eggs, 20 October 2016

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and outside) a Bird’s Egg 
by Tim Birkhead.
Bloomsbury, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2016, 978 1 4088 5125 8
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... birds that flit and scurry and sing and build in our gardens. They are like iridescent spray: the rose-flush on the breast of a male chaffinch, the gold ring round the eye of a blackbird, the jet-black cap above the slatey body of a great tit. Sparrows are said to have become much less common, but 31 of them have frequented my garden in the past seven ...

You haven’t got your sister pregnant, have you?

Jacqueline Rose and Sam Frears: No Secrets in Albert Square, 23 June 2022

... EastEnders has provided a study of sexual and domestic violence. Too much for some: one critic, Mark Lawson, complained that the prevalence of rape was making the programme ‘impossible to write or to act’, and that the series, by exploiting the topic in the service of ratings, was therefore a form of violence in itself.For others, the stories of Kathy ...

At Tranquilina’s Knee

G. Cabrera Infante, 2 June 1983

The Fragrance of Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in conversation with Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
translated by Ann Wright.
Verso, 126 pp., £9.95, May 1983, 0 86091 065 2
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... know the ‘state they were in’. This kind of news-writing and storytelling combined makes Mark Twain, the famous author of ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’, look like a Jehovah’s Witness delivering a Sunday sermon. I must remind you that Mark Twain never got the Nobel Prize for Literature. It ...

Pointing the Finger

Jacqueline Rose: ‘The Plague’, 7 May 2020

... of several conversations between them, Tarrou recounts his personal history. Afterwards, to mark their new friendship, the two men go for a night-time swim, using their passes as ‘frontline’ workers to get out onto the pier. It is the novel’s unique moment of shared pleasure. ‘Of course a man should fight for the victims,’ Rieux says as they ...

Pomenvylopes

Mark Ford: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts, 19 June 2014

The Gorgeous Nothings 
by Emily Dickinson.
New Directions, 255 pp., £26.50, October 2013, 978 0 8112 2175 7
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The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping 
by Francis Nenik, translated by Katy Derbyshire.
Readux, 64 pp., £3, October 2013, 978 3 944801 00 1
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... found it by accident,’ Werner writes, ‘in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s ...

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