At BAMPFA

Julia Bryan-Wilson: Rosie Lee Tompkins, 17 December 2020

... this work, or misunderstand it. Works by non-professional makers – sometimes called ‘self-taught’, ‘outsider’ or ‘outlier’ – have been making their way into art institutions for some time, but Black women artists who work with textiles are still far less likely to be celebrated for their artistry than for their technical skills. The ...

At Tate Britain

Rosemary Hill: Aubrey Beardsley, 24 September 2020

... out full size but had to be enlarged. Beardsley was always learning.In 1894 he made a block print, Self-Portrait in Bed, in which a doll-like head is tucked between voluminous bedclothes under a great canopy, the bedpost supported by a hermaphrodite satyr. It was a rare direct reference to the delicacy of his health, which now began to decline. ‘I believe I ...

At the Musée des arts et métiers

Richard Taws: Madame de Genlis’s Models, 18 March 2021

... appear strikingly contemporary.Unlike other Parisian institutions from the revolutionary era that self-consciously appropriated royal or religious buildings – the Louvre or the Panthéon, for example – the museum’s contents are in clear conversation with the space they occupy, the former monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs. In this temple of ...

BookTok

Malin Hay, 19 January 2023

... Hoover, whose name (or its diminutive, CoHo) is never far from the lips of BookTokers, was a self-published author until her 2016 dark romance It Ends with Us was rediscovered by TikTok in 2021. Cue thousands of crying videos and twenty million sales. Now she occupies seven of the top ten spots on the New York Times paperback fiction list. It Starts with ...

At the Design Museum

Andrew O’Hagan: Peter Saville, 19 June 2003

... lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks.Manchester – as opposed to ‘Madchester’, that later, Kangol-hatted, dungareed, spliff-wielding horror-show, c.1986, which gave the world such neanderthal hedonists as the Stone ...

Short Cuts

Yun Sheng: Chinese Fanfic, 6 February 2025

... The author of The Founder of Diabolism, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, was sentenced to three years for self-publishing and distributing a minor erotic work.There is a funny video clip imagining a young BL writer who has just passed the civil service exam seeking advice from a female lawyer:Writer: Can I continue writing sexy BL stories while working for the ...

Short Cuts

James Butler: Jeremy Hunt’s Mendacity, 21 March 2024

... what to do with mendacity at this scale. Its smaller instances are just exercises in political self-flattery: choosing misleading GDP statistics, or making tendentious claims about the tax burden, or claiming British credit for falling global energy prices. Behind them is a more pervasive lie about whether it is possible to run an advanced ...

On ‘NLR’

Jeremy Harding, 20 February 2025

... and writers about how to square up to it: at one extreme, miraculous feats of geo-engineering and self-imposed limits on climate-harming activity; at the other, massive investments in renewables to offset undiminished consumerism; between the two a range of positions including a plea for degrowth. This long conversation gave breadth and urgency to NLR’s ...

La Chasse au Pinard

Julian Barnes: Drinking for France, 7 November 2024

A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front 
by Adam D. Zientek.
McGill-Queen’s, 272 pp., £34, February, 978 0 2280 1993 0
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... Belle Époque (though not so named until four decades later), France in 1900 was an anxious and self-critical place. At the start of the 19th century, it had been the most populated of the Great European powers; now, it was the sparsest. The demographer Jacques Bertillon noted of France’s rivals that ‘they are all growing, all becoming more ...
... no committee.’ So Cabinet ministers had their first experience of having to negotiate with a self-confessed Marxist. We just kept telling them that we couldn’t have proper talks until they released Nelson Mandela and unbanned the ANC. Nelson knew we were working for him. When the Commonwealth Eminent Persons’ Group came out, he gave ex-President ...

Wartime

Alan Ryan, 6 November 1986

The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike 1984-5 
by Ian MacGregor and Rodney Tyler.
Collins, 384 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 00 217706 4
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A Balance of Power 
by Jim Prior.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 9780241119570
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... how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of generating ...

Freud’s Idols

Adam Phillips, 27 September 1990

... scenario, finds himself identifying with the idolatrous mob, he also admires Moses because of his self-control. He is an object of emulation for Freud because he does not take quick revenge on the idolators: he suffers their difference. This essay of Freud’s, written in 1913, clearly also refers implicitly to Jung’s defection; though, ironically, in this ...

George Ball on the Middle East

George Ball, 4 April 1991

... to Saddam Hussein. In letting passion overcome their political acumen, the Palestinians suffered a self-inflicted wound. They incurred the wrath not only of the West but of other Arabs as well. The Palestinians in Jordan suffered particularly: the incensed Saudis cut off Jordan’s oil allowance, and the United States Congress voted to halt America’s subsidy ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: On E.P. Thompson, 21 October 1993

... or exploitation, nor religious feeling to priestly mystification. Not the reason of science or self-interest, but only the call of love could cure the curse of Cain. An alternative human nature, in keeping with the Everlasting Gospel, lay waiting to be realised. ‘The intensity of this vision,’ Thompson writes, ‘made it impossible for Blake to fall ...

Anybody’s

Malcolm Bull, 23 March 1995

Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665 
by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat.
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 560 pp., frs 350, September 1994, 2 7118 3027 6
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Nicolas Poussin 
by Anthony Blunt.
Pallas Athene, 690 pp., £24.95, January 1995, 1 873429 64 9
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Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665 
by Richard Verdi, with an essay by Pierre Rosenberg.
Zwemmer, 336 pp., £39.50, January 1995, 0 302 00647 8
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Roma 1630: Il trionfo del pennello 
edited by Olivier Bonfait.
Electa, 260 pp., July 1994, 88 435 5047 0
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Poussin before Rome 1594-1624 
by Jacques Thuillier.
Feigen, 119 pp., £40, January 1995, 1 873232 03 9
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The Expression of the Passions 
by Jennifer Montagu.
Yale, 256 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 300 05891 8
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L’Ecole du silence 
by Marc Fumaroli.
Flammarion, 512 pp., frs 295, May 1994, 2 08 012618 0
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To Destroy Painting 
by Louis Marin, translated by Mette Hjort.
Chicago, 196 pp., £31.95, April 1995, 0 226 50535 9
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... of a rival patron, Pointel. Yet he could not possibly have said the same things to Pointel, whose Self-Portrait he dismissed as inferior. For Poussin, reading correctly was not so much a matter of having the right opinion, as of establishing an appropriate understanding of the way in which a response was related to its object. His position is set out in the ...