Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
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... began to learn who he was, or at least who he was considered to be by the new political masters of Germany. Stern tells again the story of the expulsion of German Jews from the political, professional and cultural world they had done so much to build. More revealing is the unexpected story of continuity in small things. Yes, someone painted ...

Among the Graves

Thomas Laqueur: Naming the Dead, 18 December 2008

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction 
by Mark Neely.
Harvard, 277 pp., £20.95, November 2007, 978 0 674 02658 2
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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War 
by Drew Gilpin Faust.
Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95, January 2008, 978 0 375 40404 7
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... sense of how the vast network that linked the battlefield and the home front actually worked. John Bowne of the Washington bureau of the Sanitary Commission, busy with trying to match survivors with bodies at Gettysburg, took on the case of a domestic servant who wrote saying that she thought that she might be not a widow but an abandoned wife and asked ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... is currently facing’. Even before the winter began, Simon Stevens publicly warned his government masters that the entire system, not just emergency medicine, was teetering. Without an increase in funding, he said, five million people – almost every tenth citizen of England – would find themselves on a waiting list for an operation by 2021. (We’re not ...

Philistines

Barbara Everett, 2 April 1987

... writes with a kind of working self-knowledge that brings him closer to the earlier and classic masters. His larger ‘artistic’ capacities, that is to say, can only be defined paradoxically as a larger and more coherent in-built revulsion from the ‘artistic’, or the artistic as licentiously self-defining. The evil forces in The Alteration are ...

Strange Apprentice

T.J. Clark, 8 October 2020

... the great blow’ was Cézanne’s verdict in retrospect. ‘Monet and Pissarro, the two great masters, the only two.’) The Courbet, Manet and Delacroix in oneself, in other words – and no doubt the three remained heroes – would have to be painted out. Sometime in the winter of 1872-73 (I shall return to this later) Cézanne borrowed a landscape ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... house building increased in the hopeful atmosphere of the budding welfare state, the builders’ masters voiced more ambitious aims. In 1946, Aneurin Bevan, minister for both health and housing, told Parliament that having the better-off catered for exclusively by speculative builders while the poor were set apart in council housing was wrong.You have ...

A Belated Encounter

Perry Anderson: My father’s career in the Chinese Customs Service, 30 July 1998

... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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... and flexible reinterpretation in the light of contemporary developments. Jesuits were past-masters of such ‘accommodation’, and to be admired for it, whatever the scriptural accuracy of their treatments of Christian or other holy writ. But religion – in nominalist mood, he sometimes doubts whether the term has any constructive meaning at all ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... is not to themselves. Men are motivated by the need impressed upon them to collude with their masters in the upper castes, sustaining ‘manliness’ and keeping women ‘in their place’. (You can see this lesson or transaction taking place in beer advertisements in all our countries.) The Clarence Thomas hearings, when the public had to watch the ...

The Ribs of Rosinante

Richard Gott, 21 August 1997

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Bantam, 814 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 593 03403 1
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Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara 
by Jorge Castañeda, translated by Marina Castañeda.
Bloomsbury, 480 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 7475 3334 2
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... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... went home to work on an assignment for a new course he was taking at the University of London, a masters in quantitative finance. Over the months I spent with him, I noticed that he loved the idea of heroism and was strongly attracted to creation myths. One of the first things he emailed me was a copy of one of his dissertations, ‘Gnarled Roots of a ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... French writers, with the exception of Sartre who despised him for being a civil servant with two masters. His output became meagre and his books grew poorer in style but richer in political content to please Havana and thus stay in Paris. He never got the Nobel Prize, by the way. Death got him first. Those were the most representative names in Cuban ...