i could’ve sold to russia or china

Jeremy Harding: Bradley Manning, 19 July 2012

The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History 
by Chase Madar.
OR, 167 pp., £10, April 2012, 978 1 935928 53 9
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... has to be tested not simply against the views of Assange’s lawyers and helpmates, but those of John Bellinger, for example, a former legal counsel for the State Department, who told AP television news in 2010 that bringing charges against Assange while he was still in the UK would put a loyal ally on the spot by generating a rival extradition ...

Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers

David Trotter, 30 August 2012

... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...

It was satire

Mary Beard: Caligula, 26 April 2012

Caligula: A Biography 
by Aloys Winterling, translated by Deborah Lucas Scheider, Glenn Most and Paul Psoinos.
California, 229 pp., £24.95, October 2011, 978 0 520 24895 3
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... scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but ...

Homobesottedness

Peter Green: Love in Ancient Greece, 8 May 2008

The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece 
by James Davidson.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 297 81997 4
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... is rather shy of strict definitions, but what he seems to imply by the usage is a phenomenon, as John Addington Symonds put it, ‘recognised by society and protected by opinion’. And the generic implication of the capitals is no accident. Athenian Homosexuality he sees as ‘timeless and unchanging, recognisably the same thing in the sixth, the fifth and ...

Eastern Promises

J.L. Nelson: The Christian Holy War, 29 November 2007

God’s War: A New History of the Crusades 
by Christopher Tyerman.
Penguin, 1024 pp., £12.99, October 2007, 978 0 14 026980 2
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... marginally inconvenienced,’ and, in a brief conclusion deploring anachronism, he notes that ‘John Paul II even apologised to victims of the crusades.’ Amid the din of crusade historiography, Tyerman’s voice is distinctive and consistent. His natural take is detached, sometimes ironic, sometimes sympathetic. He intends his ‘Western European ...

In a Cold Country

Michael Wood: Coetzee’s Grumpy Voice, 4 October 2007

Diary of a Bad Year 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill, 231 pp., £16.99, September 2007, 978 1 84655 120 8
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Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill, 304 pp., £17.99, March 2007, 978 1 84655 045 4
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... ruin of 20th-century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos.’ There is a remarkable brief piece on John Huston’s film The Misfits, and the tone changes entirely for two writers who clearly matter a great deal to Coetzee: Beckett and Celan. This is how we learn of ‘the distinctive prose that Beckett, using French models in the main, though with Jonathan ...

Do come to me funeral

Mary Beard: Jessica Mitford, 5 July 2007

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford 
edited by Peter Sussman.
Weidenfeld, 744 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 297 60745 6
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... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...

Stifled Truth

Wyatt Mason: Tobias Wolff and fictions of the self, 5 February 2004

Old School 
by Tobias Wolff.
Bloomsbury, 195 pp., £12.99, February 2004, 0 7475 6948 7
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... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...

Damsons and Custard

Paul Laity: Documentary cinema’s unsung poet, 3 March 2005

Humphrey Jennings 
by Kevin Jackson.
Picador, 448 pp., £30, October 2004, 0 330 35438 8
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... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...

Saved by the Ant’s Fore-Foot

David Trotter: Pound’s Martyrology, 7 July 2005

The Pisan Cantos 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
New Directions, 159 pp., $13.95, October 2003, 9780811215589
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Poems and Translations 
by Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Sieburth.
Library of America, 1363 pp., $45, October 2003, 1 931082 41 3
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... transcriptions from de Mailla’s 18th-century Histoire générale de la Chine and the writings of John Adams, the head of a great Confucian American dynasty. What awaited them now was a reviving cocktail of Pound’s trademark bohemian-pantheism. The inspiration for the Pisan Cantos was a visionary encounter on a hillside near Sant’ Ambrogio with a barefoot ...

Yikes

Barbara Taylor: My Mennonite Conversion, 2 June 2005

A Complicated Kindness 
by Miriam Toews.
Faber, 246 pp., £7.99, June 2005, 0 571 22400 8
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... hellfire – ‘yikes’, as Nomi says when this choice confronts her. Tash, who likes sex and John Lennon and string bikini underwear, is clearly hell-bound, despite her little sister’s fervent prayers on her behalf. Nomi too has a Dionysian streak, but her every hedonistic impulse is accompanied by the sharpening of diabolic knives. Nomi’s East ...

The Blindfolded Archer

Donald MacKenzie: The stochastic dynamics of market prices, 4 August 2005

The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward 
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson.
Profile, 328 pp., £9.99, September 2005, 1 86197 790 5
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... is an imbalance) had almost exhausted their capital and feared bankruptcy. The exchange’s chair, John Phelan, later told the Wall Street Journal that he feared that if the exchange closed, ‘we would never open it.’ The crash of October 1987 had no clear-cut external cause: no oil shock, no massive government default, no Twin Towers. It ...

Everything is over before it begins

A.D. Nuttall: Milton criticism, 21 June 2001

How Milton Works 
by Stanley Fish.
Harvard, 616 pp., £23.95, June 2001, 0 674 00465 5
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... are only the steam which obscures the Mirror of Truth.’ Such is Fish’s description of John Milton, the most obstinately argumentative of all English poets, the most heroically strenuous in matters of the mind, the indefatigable compiler of arguments and corroborative materials, whose watchword, all his life, was ‘freedom’. In an age when the ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time ...