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The Limits of Caste

Hazel V. Carby, 21 January 2021

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents 
by Isabel Wilkerson.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £20, August 2020, 978 0 241 48651 1
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... that is, the descendants of the 388,746 enslaved people who disembarked in the region of North America that would become the United States. It represents their histories and culture as not only central to but exemplary of a singular national narrative – ‘a people’s journey, a nation’s story’ – the culmination of which is the establishment ...

Bye-bye Firefly

Edmund Gordon: Carnival of the Insects, 12 May 2022

The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World 
by Oliver Milman.
Atlantic, 260 pp., £16.99, January, 978 1 83895 117 7
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Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse 
by Dave Goulson.
Vintage, 328 pp., £9.99, May, 978 1 5291 1442 3
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... a professor of biology at the University of Sussex who was involved in the Krefeld study, and Oliver Milman, an environment correspondent at the Guardian, are both convinced that we can’t afford to wait for more facts to emerge. Their books cover much the same ground, though with different emphases. Both make the point that insects are an integral part ...

The man whose portrait they painted

Patrick Procktor, 12 July 1990

A Life with Food 
by Peter Langan and Brian Sewell.
Bloomsbury, 128 pp., £16.99, May 1990, 9780747502203
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... detachable panels to the measurements all round the room: detachable but designed to last, like Oliver Messel’s Venice, which adorned the same room in the Thirties, all striped poles and cotton-wool pigeons, and which remained until the Coq d’Or. Peter was considerate enough when obliterating what he referred to as the ‘Ghost-Ship’ on the end wall ...

Hanged on a Venerable Elm

Colin Kidd: Samuel Adams and the Mob, 2 February 2023

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams 
by Stacy Schiff.
Little, Brown, 421 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 0 316 44111 7
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... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...

On Roy Fisher

August Kleinzahler, 29 June 2017

... Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable touring venue for musicians in the 1930s and was, when Fisher visited, being demolished. This was Fisher’s first visit to America. He was already fifty. His plane touched down at ...

Hebrew without tears

Blair Worden, 20 May 1982

Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603-1655 
by David Katz.
Oxford, 312 pp., £17.50, April 1982, 0 19 821885 0
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... On 4 December 1655, Oliver Cromwell opened a conference summoned ‘to consider of proposals in behalf of the JEWS, by Menasseh ben Israel, an agent come to London in behalf of many of them, to live and trade here, and desiring to have free use of their synagogues’. This gathering of politicians, clergymen, lawyers and merchants, which is known to history as the Whitehall Conference, was invited to rescind the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290 ...
... imagination were still intact? I asked him to imagine entering one of our local squares from the north side, to walk through it, in imagination or in memory, and tell me the buildings he might pass as he walked. He listed the buldings on his right side, but none of those on his left. I then asked him to imagine entering the square from the south. Again he ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: Ezra Pound in Italy, 23 October 2008

... broadcasts on Radio Rome. The DTC was in Metato, a small town in a swathe of unremarkable farmland north of Pisa. Nowadays, from a couple of spots in the middle of nowhere you can look back across the plain to the Baptistry and the Leaning Tower, shimmering out of the Campo dei Miracoli. These views are the only evidence you’re likely to find that the camp ...

Siding with Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens, 26 October 1989

The Rushdie File 
edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.
Fourth Estate/ICA, 268 pp., £5.95, July 1989, 0 947795 84 7
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CounterBlasts No 4: Sacred Cows 
by Fay Weldon.
Chatto, 43 pp., £2.99, July 1989, 0 7011 3556 5
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Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation 
by Timothy Brennan.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, September 1989, 0 333 49020 7
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... Was this, for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who but an effete ...

Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut

Theo Tait: Tom Wolfe’s Bloody Awful Novel, 6 January 2005

I am Charlotte Simmons 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 676 pp., £20, November 2004, 0 224 07486 5
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... the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not Tom Clancy or Dan Brown either. He’s more like the Oliver Stone of American letters: crass, hectoring but passionately interested – and occasionally touched by genius. Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts considerably ...

Torday’s Scorpion

Basil Davidson, 9 April 1992

The African Experience 
by Roland Oliver.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £19.99, August 1991, 0 297 82022 2
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A Thousand Years of East Africa 
by John Sutton.
British Institute in Eastern Africa, 111 pp., £8, November 1990, 1 872566 00 6
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When the grass is gone 
edited by P.W.T. Baxter.
Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 215 pp., December 1991, 91 7106 318 8
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The Scramble for Africa 
by Thomas Pakenham.
Weidenfeld, 738 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 297 81130 4
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... irrelevant, that is, to the proper concerns of history? Some of this still lingers. Professor Oliver’s new summary of sociopolitical development since remote times – above all, since the onset of metal-using technologies – is all the more persuasive for the prudence that has marked his style of work. Not for him the early illuminations of ...

Overstatements

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Anti-Semitism, 10 June 2010

Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England 
by Anthony Julius.
Oxford, 811 pp., £25, February 2010, 978 0 19 929705 4
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... there were appreciable numbers of Jews among the rich mix of people who followed Roman armies north, to create a damp, chilly and not altogether convincing version of Mediterranean culture in the provinces of Britannia. Yet these Jews of the Roman Empire have left virtually no trace of their presence here, and even the evidence for their nemesis, the ...

Gabble, Twitter and Hoot

Ian Hacking: Language, deafness and the senses, 1 July 1999

I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses 
by Jonathan Rée.
HarperCollins, 399 pp., £19.99, January 1999, 0 00 255793 2
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... part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée. The quotation is from Bottom’s burlesque of love at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The swain says, ‘I see a voice’ – his ...

Diary

Carlos Dada: At the Mexican Border, 8 October 2020

... that would take him to Quito in Ecuador. Ngu was a teacher at a secondary school in the Anglophone north-western region of Cameroon, where there has been fighting since 2017 between separatists and troops loyal to the Francophone government of Paul Biya, who has run the country since 1982. The conflict has claimed around three thousand lives and displaced half ...

Poor Man’s Crime

Ian Gilmour, 5 December 1991

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century 
by Peter Linebaugh.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 7139 9045 7
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... us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during ...

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