Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
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... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ‘strict barriers against further immigrations of Brown, Black and Yellow peoples’. The first barrier on the US-Mexico border, Grandin notes, was constructed from wire that had surrounded the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War. In the second book, Freedom’s Dominion: A ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in stuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never even looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) if being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... writes, ‘changed their windows once a week … and crowds of gawkers gathered to watch the brown paper come down to reveal the next batch of displays.’ Warhol, it was written, ‘is able to create with equal skill and imagination anything from an industrial advertisement to a fashion page to a window display’.He also liked penises. ‘Andy had this ...

My Year of Reading Lemmishly

Jonathan Lethem, 10 February 2022

... It’s a doomed effort, full of condescension and confusion, like a ballet-master analysing James Brown.’Sterling’s basic insight is on target. Alone in Poland, Lem seems to have guessed at what a serious fiction based on technological speculation would look like, and willed himself to equal it. He extrapolated, in other words, from the examples of Wells ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
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... same-sex love was deleted from the history of ‘Greek homosexuality’ by Kenneth Dover and David Halperin, as if the fact that a spectacularly homosexualising culture produced some of the most spectacular (but non-sodomitical) lesbian love poetry and has a spectacular (but non-sodomitical) homosexual relationship at the centre of its foundational epic ...

Empire of Signs

James Wood: Joseph Roth, 4 March 1999

The String of Pearls 
by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Granta, 224 pp., £12.99, May 1998, 1 86207 087 3
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... Left, ‘had the novelist’s gift of telling lies’, and it seems that Roth had it too. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumour worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born – a town about which, in different ...

Peeping Tam

Karl Miller, 6 August 1981

... from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate of Auchinleck, mentioned in an additional stanza contained in one version of the poem, was called ‘romantic’ by a son of the house, James Boswell. Kyle counts, then, as a highly romantic vicinity. But it ...

Make for the Boondocks

Tom Nairn: Hardt and Negri, 5 May 2005

Multitude 
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 241 14240 7
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... by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have ...

Should we build a wall around North Wales?

Daniel Trilling: The Refugee Crisis, 13 July 2017

Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move 
by Reece Jones.
Verso, 208 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 1 78478 471 3
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Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System 
by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 0 241 28923 5
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No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance 
by Natasha King.
Zed, 208 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 1 78360 467 8
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... of migration between countries within Africa. Jones gives short shrift to scholars such as Wendy Brown, who argued in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010) that today’s border walls are a sign not of strength but that state sovereignty is being eroded by globalisation: they fulfil a psychological role, by providing a reassuring image of security to a ...

Sacred Parallelogram

Rosemary Hill: Women Paint Women, 23 April 2026

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway 
by Diane Boucher.
Unicorn, 351 pp., £27.99, June 2025, 978 1 916846 78 4
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Souvenirs 
by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.
David Zwirner, 184 pp., £10.95, May 2025, 978 1 64423 162 3
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... the Continent. Le Brun’s image of Karoline was considered risqué because, beneath her reddish-brown gown, her feet are bare. In her engagingly conversational memoir, Souvenirs, Le Brun records that the princess’s husband responded to complaints from his scandalised grandparents by placing a pair of elegant shoes under the frame and explaining they had ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways of ...

Aloha, aloha

Ian Hacking, 7 September 1995

What ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 316 pp., £19.95, July 1995, 0 226 73368 8
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... Captain Cook relatively small potatoes. Not small potatoes for the culture wars, however. Enter a brown man, Obeyesekere, who is a professor at Princeton but who grew up on a colonised island – Sri Lanka – saying that a white man, a professor at Chicago, is foisting white myths onto islanders and perpetuating the fantasy that natives first see Europeans ...