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The Art-House Crowd

Daniel Soar: Svetislav Basara’s fictions, 5 May 2005

Chinese Letter 
by Svetislav Basara, translated by Ana Lucic.
Dalkey Archive, 132 pp., £7.99, January 2005, 9781564783745
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... crowd in black turtlenecks and trenchcoats, and they have a certain sophistication. The least unknown of Basara’s novels is Fama o biciklistima (1988) – speculatively, ‘The Fuss about Cyclists’ – and I looked up a copy to find out what the fuss was about. It turns out that I understand less Serbian than I thought I did, but the book appears to ...

Drink hard, pray hard and simply vanish

Jack Rakove: The history of the American revolution, 5 April 2001

Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 
by Jon Butler.
Harvard, 324 pp., £19.50, May 2000, 0 674 00091 9
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Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans 
by Joyce Appleby.
Harvard, 322 pp., £17.95, May 2000, 0 674 00236 9
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... the most striking developments were tied to slavery, which produced extremes of wealth and poverty unknown in other regions. The free economy of small farmers and a merchant class with a few grandees and many more ambitious shopkeepers produced less dramatic results. American farmers sought a decent ‘competence’ that would sustain both themselves and their ...
The Invasion Handbook 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7
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... to be harsh. He won’t tell the reader what is meant by a ‘boortree’ or a ‘cuas’, equally unknown to me and the OED. You could probably guess from the context that ‘stocious’ is Irish for ‘drunk’ but even an Irishman I consulted could not explain ‘pochles’, which occurs in the same line. However, ‘pobby’ means ‘swollen’ and a ...

Exotic to whom?

Tessa Hadley: Kiran Desai, 5 October 2006

The Inheritance of Loss 
by Kiran Desai.
Hamish Hamilton, 324 pp., £16.99, August 2006, 0 241 14348 9
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... tradition, on the one hand, and the various vernacular Indian traditions on the other (mostly unknown outside India, except to diaspora audiences). The opportunities English offers the novelist – apart from anything else, as a lingua franca for the educated in a multilingual society – are balanced against the loss of the sense of belonging that ...

Second Time Around

Stephen Sedley: In the Court of Appeal, 6 September 2007

The Court of Appeal 
by Gavin Drewry, Louis Blom-Cooper and Charles Blake.
Hart, 196 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 1 84113 387 4
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... and cannot be released. For such prisoners, many of them young and disturbed, an unlit tunnel of unknown length lies ahead. The appellate role is complex in such a situation: it has to respect what legislation prescribes, but as long as Parliament leaves judges some discretion the courts can seek to mitigate law with justice. The legislative erosion of ...

Diary

Fiona Pitt-Kethley: The Ravine, 20 May 2004

... violence. Teachers don’t dish out much in the way of punishment. Expulsion is pretty much unknown. Two boys in my son’s class tried to cut off another boy’s finger with a pair of scissors. Their punishment was to be kept in at break. I have been going to karate twice a week with my son for the last ten months. We practise hard. Over the next few ...

Po-210 as a Poison

Norman Dombey: Death by Polonium, 2 August 2007

Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB 
by Alex Goldfarb, with Marina Litvinenko.
Simon and Schuster, 369 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 1 84737 081 5
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... anywhere else, the death would have been merely suspicious and its cause would have remained unknown. But UCH is not only a leading teaching hospital; it is also associated with University College London, which has a Department of Medical Physics with a strong radiation physics group. A network of haematologists, radiation experts and toxicologists was ...

Who has the biggest books?

Craig Clunas: Missionaries in China, 7 February 2008

Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 
by Liam Matthew Brockey.
Harvard, 496 pp., £22.95, March 2007, 978 0 674 02448 9
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... sacramental formulae and gestures, ‘some out of mockery, some because they found those unknown words to be amusing’, and of Figueiredo debating with a peasant about who created Heaven and Earth, an exchange that degenerates into a dispute about who has the biggest books to back up their claims. The rules drawn up for the confraternities which ...

Babylon with Bananas

Michael Newton: Tarzan's best friend, 29 January 2009

Me Cheeta: The Autobiography 
by Cheeta.
Fourth Estate, 320 pp., £16.99, October 2008, 978 0 00 727863 3
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... above all, a tale of unrequited love. The book is an ode to Johnny Weissmuller, a letter from an unknown chimpanzee. Johnny moves in another element, like a swimmer into cleanness leaping. He learned his characteristic head-held-high breaststroke as a boy swimming outside in Chicago, keeping his chin up to avoid the shit floating in the river. Film ...

At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

... panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate ...

Teeter-Totters

Jeremy Harding: Teeter-Tottering on the Border, 20 April 2017

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary 
by Ronald Rael.
California, 184 pp., £24.95, May 2017, 978 0 520 28394 7
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... with fulcrums installed along the wall, children rising on one side as their unknown playmates descend on the other. The more absurd the tweaks they suggest, the more arbitrary and hostile the project of border fortification begins to look. Rael praises a risky, revisionist essay by the American architect Lebbeus Woods on Israel’s ...

How to Perfume a Glove

Adam Smyth: Early Modern Cookbooks, 5 January 2017

Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen 
by Wendy Wall.
Pennsylvania, 328 pp., £53, November 2015, 978 0 8122 4758 9
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... with the stooped mutterings of Robert Boyle, John Aubrey and Robert Hooke, so, Wall suggests, the unknown woman at home, experimenting with endive and plantin, or (in Partridge’s words) trussing woodcocks ‘into the Coffyn with swete larde around them’, was taking part in the same process of probing what Bacon described as nature ‘in bonds’: ‘when ...

Denunciations

Ruth Scurr: Foucault in the Bastille, 14 December 2017

Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives 
by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, edited by Nancy Luxon, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton.
Minnesota, 328 pp., £28.99, January 2017, 978 0 8166 9534 8
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... in the country, to have lawsuits, to lend usuriously and recklessly, to walk his poor spirit upon unknown paths, and to believe himself capable of the very greatest works.’ Jean Antoine Tousard was sent to the château of Bicêtre on 21 April 1701: ‘Apostate friar, seditious, capable of the greatest crimes, sodomite, atheist if it were possible; this is a ...

On Luljeta Lleshanaku

Michael Hofmann: Luljeta Lleshanaku, 4 April 2019

... Weissbort), Lleshanaku is material, then metaphorical, then material again: The search for unknown words is a complete failure. They have all been discovered. They are round and soft, without mystery little planets festering with ants too tired to mount a hobo’s shoe.Poetry to her is chiefly a mode of inquiry. ‘What was it like? What happened? How ...

Impossible Desires

Adam Smyth: Death of the Book, 7 March 2024

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book 
by Brian Cummings.
Oxford, 562 pp., £37.99, February 2022, 978 0 19 284731 7
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... of eminent visitors), before passing after the Dissolution of the Monasteries through the hands of unknown collectors. The Latin text still has its original red leather goatskin binding: the earliest Western bookbinding to survive, containing the oldest intact European book, and the whole thing in such astonishingly good condition that it seems to flicker ...

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