Anthropomorphic Carrot

Polly Dickson: Tales from Hoffmann, 23 January 2025

‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny 
by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated by Peter Wortsman.
Archipelago, 425 pp., £14.99, October 2023, 978 1 953861 70 2
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The Wounded Storyteller: The Traumatic Tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann 
by E.T.A. Hoffmann, translated by Jack Zipes.
Yale, 277 pp., £30, April 2023, 978 0 300 26319 0
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... over and reflect on one another, accumulating into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a disenfranchised self. Hoffmann appears at the end of this tale too and it has been read as an autobiographical fiction that deals with his ill-fated love for a teenage music student of his, Julia Marc. His repetition shapes events both within and between his texts – it raises ...

Besides, I’ll be dead

Meehan Crist: When the Ice Melts, 22 February 2018

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World 
by Jeff Goodell.
Black Inc., 340 pp., £17.99, October 2017, 978 1 76064 041 5
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... But hoping for a rise in sea levels of just one or two feet by 2100 is starting to look a lot like self-delusion, and for those who have the luxury of choice, clinging to life at the waterline is increasingly an exercise in self-defeat. For politicians and the rich, who prosper from maintenance of the status quo, it is ...

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili, 7 September 2023

The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale 
by Simon Clark and Will Louch.
Penguin, 342 pp., £10.99, February 2023, 978 0 241 98894 7
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Icarus: The Life and Death of the Abraaj Group 
by Brian Brivati.
Biteback, 349 pp., £9.99, January 2022, 978 1 78590 733 3
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 310 pp., £20, April 2023, 978 1 83976 898 9
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... CDC Group. These public funds allowed Naqvi to shift gear, becoming an ‘impact investor’ – a self-appointed capitalist saviour of the wretched of the earth – and being invited to sit on the boards of various councils and commissions for CEOs interested in sustainable development.In 2012, Naqvi paid half a million dollars in sponsorship to a Clinton ...

Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... a prominent Baptist minister who grew up in poverty in rural Georgia and through hard work and self-discipline managed to join Atlanta’s Black middle class. The elder King established strong connections with the city’s white power brokers – so strong, in fact, that even while speaking out against racism he urged parishioners, including the ...

Beefcake Ease

Miranda Carter: Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen, 14 January 2002

Robert Mitchum: Solid, Dad, Crazy 
by Damien Love.
Batsford, 208 pp., £15.99, December 2001, 0 7134 8707 0
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Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care 
by Lee Server.
Faber, 590 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 571 20994 7
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McQueen: The Biography 
by Christopher Sandford.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £16.99, October 2001, 0 00 257195 1
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... his best roles, the doomed Jeff Bailey in the 1947 film Out of the Past: ‘Mitchum is so sleepily self-confident with the women that when he slopes into clinches you expect him to snore in their faces . . . his curious languor suggests Bing Crosby supersaturated on barbiturates.’ The following year Mitchum would be arrested for possession of marijuana and ...

Why all the hoopla?

Hal Foster: Frank Gehry, 23 August 2001

Frank Gehry: The Art of Architecture 
edited by Jean-Louis Cohen et al.
Abrams, 500 pp., £55, May 2001, 0 8109 6929 7
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... from a resistant material, structure or context – architecture quickly becomes arbitrary or self-indulgent. (Here again part of the problem might be the technical facility of Catia, which is said to translate ‘the gestural quality from model to built work’ all but directly.) The great irony is that Gehry fans tend to confuse his arbitrariness with ...

The Pope and Pachamama

Colm Tóibín, 22 May 2025

... writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013), ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline: ‘His will must seek to impose on a personality which has its share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering ...

Ownership Struggle

Susan Pedersen: Refusenik DPs, 5 June 2025

Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War 
by Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Princeton, 341 pp., £30, January, 978 0 691 23002 3
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... for pragmatic reasons, empowered DPs and legitimised anti-Soviet feelings. Encouraged to establish self-governing institutions, ‘Soviet’ DPs organised themselves by nationality, building the schools, churches, youth groups and civic associations that underwrote what it meant to be ‘Latvian’ or ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Russian’. The camps fostered new ...

Why waste time hot airing?

Francesca Wade: The Best-Paid Woman in NYC, 26 June 2025

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy 
edited by Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer.
DelMonico, 304 pp., £44.99, December 2024, 978 1 63681 135 2
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Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters 
by Deborah Parker.
Harvard, 170 pp., £20.95, October 2024, 978 0 674 29981 8
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... revisions spilling over onto extra scraps of paper appended to the margins. For a largely self-taught young woman of that period, such a career was remarkable. As the exhibition’s curators note in the catalogue, it would have been near impossible for a Black woman. But Greene – whose ancestors, on both sides, included African Americans enslaved a ...

Good Vibrations

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: On the Rule of Law, 12 September 2024

Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Harvard, 326 pp., £37.95, December 2023, 978 0 674 29077 8
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... an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in ...

The Last Generation

Katherine Harloe: Classics beyond Balliol, 10 October 2024

The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present 
by Oswyn Murray.
Allen Lane, 517 pp., £30, May, 978 0 241 36057 6
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... held long-term visiting professorships, feature merely as places to which he went to escape the ‘self-absorption’ of the All Souls common room.If considered as a memoir, however, the book’s selectivity and partiality are intrinsic parts of its design and interest. By setting out so clearly his choices of who and what matters in ancient ...

Painting is terribly difficult

Julian Barnes: Myths about Monet, 14 December 2023

Monet: The Restless Vision 
by Jackie Wullschläger.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 241 18830 9
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... master at the Collège du Havre, ‘left no opinion of his disruptive pupil’. Monet was a self-described ‘vagabond’ child who for forty years never spoke of his mother. The written records are largely one-sided: he threw away other people’s letters while they kept his. Camille exists only in people’s comments about her: there is a single ...

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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... for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, he stank up the bathroom on one of Trump’s campaign planes so badly that Trump bellowed, ‘Rudy! That’s fucking ...

Unicorn or Narwhal?

Lorraine Daston: Linnaeus makes the rules, 22 February 2024

The Man Who Organised Nature: The Life of Linnaeus 
by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson.
Princeton, 484 pp., £35, July 2023, 978 0 691 21342 2
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... account of Linnaeus as we are likely to get for at least a generation.Despite his unflattering self-portrait, Linnaeus wasn’t modest. As a young man he drew up lists of the books he intended to publish, and much later in life, anxious to manage his posthumous reputation, he prepared several vitae of himself that he hoped would serve as material for ...

Not Corrupt Enough

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Whose Cold War?, 20 March 2025

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power 
by Sergey Radchenko.
Cambridge, 760 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 1 108 47735 2
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The World of the Cold War 1945-91 
by Vladislav Zubok.
Pelican, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 69614 9
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... of the two superpowers capable of destroying the other with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was self-evidently weaker than the US in economic, diplomatic, reputational and (for most of the period) military terms. That inequality, and Soviet resentment of it, is at the heart of the stories Zubok and Radchenko tell.Looking back wistfully to the days of the ...