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Diary

Max Hastings: Letters from the Front, 10 September 2015

... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
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Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
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... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...

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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... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...

What Wotan Wants

Jerry Fodor, 5 August 2004

Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s ‘Ring’ 
by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht.
Oxford, 241 pp., £14.99, April 2004, 0 19 517359 7
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... offers a sort of dialectical critique (the suggestion has been made before – see, for example, Michael Ewans’s Wagner and Aeschylus: The ‘Ring’ and the ‘Oresteia’, 1982). One might take each cycle as a reverse image of the other; the structural symmetries are striking. The Oresteia begins with the murder of a hero, Agamemnon, and ends with a ...

Beyond Textualism

Christopher Norris, 19 January 1984

Text Production 
by Michael Riffaterre, translated by Terese Lyons.
Columbia, 341 pp., $32.50, September 1983, 0 231 05334 7
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Writing and the Experience of Limits 
by Philippe Sollers, edited by David Hayman, translated by Philip Barnard.
Columbia, 242 pp., $31.50, September 1983, 0 231 05292 8
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The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory 
by Paul Fry.
Yale, 239 pp., £18, October 1984, 0 300 02924 1
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Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 
by Paul de Man, edited by Wlad Godzich.
Methuen, 308 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 416 35860 8
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Displacement: Derrida and After 
edited by Mark Krupnick.
Indiana, 198 pp., £9.75, December 1983, 0 253 31803 3
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Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre 
by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Columbia, 299 pp., £39, August 1983, 0 231 05492 0
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... Lacan) providing a link between psychic economy and the workings of materialised textual desire. Bliss was it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... off for the Blackwall Tunnel, the tour of inspection was cancelled. Deferred satisfaction. Future bliss. That’s what this gig is all about. It’s a Calvinist package. Suffer now, the worse the better, and paradise will follow. We are being asked to endure the noise, dust, pollution of a 24-hour building-site as the justification for the heavenly pleasure ...

Jangling Monarchy

Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides, 8 August 2002

A Companion to Milton 
by Thomas N. Corns.
Blackwell, 528 pp., £80, June 2001, 0 631 21408 9
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The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography 
by Barbara K. Lewalski.
Blackwell, 816 pp., £25, December 2000, 0 631 17665 9
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... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...

I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share his political views. It was ‘bliss’ to have the legitimacy and the millions of readers that the Times provided him, Hersh writes, but he remained frustrated by the paper’s ambivalence towards established power. By the summer of 1972, Hersh had uncovered three controversial projects ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... indeed a parson – curate of Okewood in Surrey – and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s surviving early sermons: recycled, inoffensive homilies in which the revolutionary events in France were scarcely even noises off. (The mild young Malthus could have ...

Baffled Traveller

Jonathan Rée: Hegel, 30 November 2000

Hegel: An Intellectual Biography 
by Horst Althaus, translated by Michael Tarsh.
Polity, 292 pp., £45, May 2000, 0 7456 1781 6
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Hegel: Biographie 
by Jacques D'Hondt.
Calmann-Lévy, 424 pp., frs 150, October 1998, 2 7021 2919 6
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... condemns it to a restless state of mistrust. Beguiled by a mirage of perfect epistemological bliss, it denies the knowledge it has, deserts it and sets off optimistically on what will prove to be a ‘journey of despair’. The itinerary can be read off from the chapter titles of the Phenomenology. Consciousness begins by putting its faith in the ...

The Pills in the Fridge

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Christodora’, 30 March 2017

Christodora 
by Tim Murphy.
Picador, 432 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 1 5098 1857 0
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... The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care ...

On (Not) Saying What You Mean

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 1995

... there was no lecture about the Famine, the Fenians, Young Ireland, the 1916 Rising. Even poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... exciting intellectual conjunction: for anyone with half a mind for philosophy, it must have been bliss to be in Freiburg that year; for a young student it must have been heaven. And one of the lucky ones was a 22-year-old Jew from Lithuania called Emmanuel Levinas. He had been born in 1906 – which made him just six months younger than Sartre – and after ...

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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... carers: rapid sequences of dots and dashes deftly etched on the palm and fingers of a hand. Such bliss reinforces, and is itself in turn reinforced by, the intervening solitude. Herzog first met Straubinger when researching a documentary on the provision of facilities for the disabled. The film they subsequently made together is a stirring testament to her ...

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art 
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9
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... does not visit it, but hears the groans of torment from afar), and the Elysian Fields, the zone of bliss, where Aeneas meets his father, Anchises. Spirits do not stay in the Elysian Fields for ever – there is an elaborate cycle of reincarnation at work – but the Aeneid draws a clear connection, as the Odyssey does not, between one’s actions in life and ...

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