Serious Battle and Slay

Kevin Okoth: ‘Glory’, 18 August 2022

Glory 
by NoViolet Bulawayo.
Chatto, 416 pp., £18.99, April, 978 1 78474 429 8
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... the apples on a tree.) But what she lacks in formal education, Dr Sweet Mother makes up for in self-confidence, street smarts and ambition. In her Independence Day speech, she denounces Tuvy’s ambitions to succeed the Old Horse, but she is quietly plotting to bypass the Seat of Power and install herself as leader. Bulawayo has chosen her animals ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... to their previous owners, a dozen being among the 25 barons – the most barefaced example of self-interest in the proceedings. When the king met the barons at Oxford a month later, they treated him with contempt. John was in bed, unable to walk because of gout. The barons refused to come to him in his chamber. When he was carried into them on a ...

As Bad as Poisoned

Blair Worden: James I, 3 March 2016

The Murder of King James I 
by Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell.
Yale, 618 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 300 21496 3
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... bolder claims disfigures, is also impaired by the worn phrasing of portentous historiographical self-positioning. This is a ‘post-revisionist’ volume that aims to ‘revitalise’ studies of the era by, among other moves, adopting the insights of ‘the “cultural turn”’. The authors deploy a ‘diverse set of methodologies and narrative ...

Reinstall the Footlights

T.J. Clark: The Art of the Russian Revolution, 16 November 2017

... might still emerge a ‘new object’ needing to be represented was not, in 1932, simply self-delusion. I realise that this last form of words offers cold comfort, and no doubt has a ‘Western Marxist’ flavour to it. But I stand by it – I think it is true to the tortured reality – and turn finally to Deineka and Eisenstein for support. Not ...

The President and the Bomb

Adam Shatz, 16 November 2017

... favourite potential target. Incinerating North Korea in a pre-emptive strike would be an act of self-defence, as Trump sees it: in his speech to the UN General Assembly, he said that the US ‘will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea’ if ‘Rocket Man’ develops a weapon that can reach Denver. (Like genocide, nuclear war is invariably ...

Chimps and Bulldogs

Stefan Collini: The Huxley Inheritance, 8 September 2022

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family 
by Alison Bashford.
Allen Lane, 529 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 43432 1
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... been rediscovered in 1900) that an adequate explanation could be given. Part of Julian Huxley’s self-appointed task was to frame a new evolutionary synthesis that married Darwinian and Mendelian ideas.Genetics also opened up new possibilities for the human species. It was standard practice in horticulture and livestock breeding to weed out weaker strains ...

Inky Pilgrimage

Mark Ford, 24 May 2007

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie 
edited by Donald Blount.
South Carolina, 430 pp., £30.95, January 2006, 1 57003 248 3
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... dominant themes of both his journal and his letters to Elsie is the urge to escape the ‘terrible self-contemplation’ to which he is prone, especially at weekends, in the city; and to recover through contact with nature a sense of his physical being. ‘I doubt,’ he writes of an outing in the autumn of 1902,if there is any keener delight in the world ...

The New World Disorder

Tariq Ali, 9 April 2015

... about the English bourgeoisie: Their character has been moulded in the course of centuries. Class self-esteem has entered into their blood and marrow, their nerves and bones. It will be much harder to knock the self-confidence of world rulers out of them. But the American will knock it out just the same, when he gets ...

Jade and Plastic

Andrew Nathan: How bad was Mao?, 17 November 2005

Mao: The Unknown Story 
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Cape, 814 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 224 07126 2
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... to make claims that are simply unsourced. Perhaps they think these are conclusions that flow self-evidently from the pattern of events. They include claims that Stalin deliberately kept his ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US ...

What is Tom saying to Maureen?

Ian Hacking: What We Know about Autism, 11 May 2006

The Science and Fiction of Autism 
by Laura Schreibman.
Harvard, 293 pp., £17.95, December 2005, 0 674 01931 8
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Send in the Idiots, or How We Grew to Understand the World 
by Kamran Nazeer.
Bloomsbury, 230 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 7475 7910 5
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... The book also spread the word autism he had made up a little earlier, to indicate the total self-absorption of some of his patients. His examples were pretty bizarre, and make you think that the bourgeoisie of those days were even nuttier than we can imagine. The noun was used regularly, if not frequently, in German-language (including what we would now ...

A Little Swine

Sheila Fitzpatrick: On Snitching, 3 November 2005

Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero 
by Catriona Kelly.
Granta, 352 pp., £17.99, May 2005, 1 86207 747 9
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... uneasiness about motive: is the denouncer the patriot that he claims to be, or is he acting out of self-interest and a wish to settle personal scores? The rhetoric of civic virtue with which governments (and schools, prisons and other closed institutions) surround denunciation coexists with a subaltern counter-discourse in which denunciation is an act of ...

The Eerie One

Bee Wilson: Peter Lorre, 23 March 2006

The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre 
by Stephen Youngkin.
Kentucky, 613 pp., $39.95, September 2005, 0 8131 2360 7
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... facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from ...

Get knitting

Ian Hacking: Birth and Death of the Brain, 18 August 2005

The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind 
by Steven Rose.
Cape, 344 pp., £20, March 2005, 0 224 06254 9
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... defined type of dementia called vascular dementia. Those of us not affected yet, either in self or family, tend to equate Alzheimer’s with memory loss, and that is what Rose inevitably emphasises. We forget the ‘agitation, aggression, hallucinations, delusions and other behavioural and psychiatric symptoms of Alzheimer’s’: I am quoting from the ...

Hyacinth Boy

Mark Ford: T.S. Eliot, 21 September 2006

T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet 
by James E. Miller.
Pennsylvania State, 468 pp., £29.95, August 2005, 0 271 02681 2
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The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 270 pp., $35, April 2005, 0 300 09743 3
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Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 203 pp., £22.50, May 2005, 0 300 10707 2
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... Series (1905). The use of these descriptive lines in ‘Gerontion’, in many ways an Eliot self-portrait, suggests that indeed Eliot identified with Fitzgerald in spite of his appearance in the Ellis book. But surely only a homophobic bigot would have refrained from ‘pointing out his passion’ for a poet he admired on account of his appearance in ...

Like a Mullet in Love

James Wood: Homage to Verga, 10 August 2000

Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories 
by Giovanni Verga, translated by G.H. McWilliam.
Penguin, 272 pp., £8.99, June 1999, 0 14 044741 5
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... depiction of ordinary rural life, in the coaxing of opaque inner lives, and most of all in his self-smothering ability to see life not as a writer might see it, but entirely from within the minds of his mostly uneducated characters. More than Chekhov indeed, who was always an intellectual, if an uncannily bashful one, Verga writes from within a community ...