Brush for Hire

Eamon Duffy: Protestant painting, 19 August 2004

The Reformation of the Image 
by Joseph Leo Koerner.
Reaktion, 494 pp., £29.95, April 2004, 1 86189 172 5
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... devotion, purity and faith, and hence for a right disposition in taking communion, so that ‘I may receive not merely the sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, but also its reality and power’ (non solum sacramentum . . . sed etiam rem et virtutem sacramentum). On this point, then, the theological contrast between externality and interiority which ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... as a brilliant relic of its own time but as an unstilled voice in the conversation of ours. We may explore and even admire the minds of Gladstone’s mentors and contemporaries: Peel’s earnest reforming zeal, Palmerston’s gung-ho gunboat liberalism, Disraeli’s sugar castles of empire – though each is splendid in its way, they do not speak to us ...

Mirror Images

Jenny Diski: Piers Morgan, 31 March 2005

The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade 
by Piers Morgan.
Ebury, 484 pp., £17.99, March 2005, 0 09 190506 0
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... the will. I had the same reaction as I read Piers Morgan’s diaries. Whatever sense of humour I may have had drained away as the ever ebullient, jokey, matey, vindictive Morgan described a self-contained world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very ...

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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... been a feature of his work from the beginning return with renewed force in the Pisan Cantos. He may also have been struck by the several occasions in Walden on which seasonal change provides an unrealising change in point of view: The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ...

Dedicated to Democracy

Corey Robin: How the US did for Guatemala, 18 November 2004

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War 
by Greg Grandin.
Chicago, 311 pp., £40, October 2004, 0 226 30571 6
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... of Grandin’s book brilliantly evokes this mixture of modern and anti-modern elements. On 29 May that year, roughly five hundred Mayan peasants assembled in the town centre to ask the mayor to hear their complaints against local planters, which were to be presented by a union delegation from the capital. Firing on the protesters, a military detachment ...

Who’s sorry now?

Andrew O’Hagan: Michael Finkel gets lucky, 2 June 2005

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa 
by Michael Finkel.
Chatto, 312 pp., £15.99, May 2005, 0 7011 7688 1
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Burning Down My Master’s House 
by Jayson Blair.
New Millennium, 288 pp., $24.95, March 2004, 9781932407266
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The Journalist and the Murderer 
by Janet Malcolm.
Granta, 163 pp., £8.99, January 2004, 1 86207 637 5
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... his views to his subject? A: I believe that one should never disclose one’s views, because it may shut off further communication. Q: Has that ever happened in your experience? A: Yes. Frequently [subjects] would ask me questions that if I answered them truthfully would shut off further communication. Q: And how did you answer them? A: I would tell ...

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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... when the Bible failed to match his internal conviction the Bible was set aside. Milton may indeed have privately disliked the Decalogue. What is significant is that he felt obliged to argue carefully, using a battery of Biblical allusions, that the Ten Commandments were laid upon the Jews and do not apply to Christians, who come later. So far from ...

Freedom to Tango

Michael Wood: Contemporary Indian English novels, 19 April 2001

Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels 
by Tabish Khair.
Oxford, 407 pp., £21.50, March 2001, 0 19 565296 7
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An Obedient Father 
by Akhil Sharma.
Faber, 282 pp., £9.99, January 2001, 0 571 20673 5
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The Death of Vishnu 
by Manil Suri.
Bloomsbury, 329 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 0 7475 5270 3
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The Glass Palace 
by Amitav Ghosh.
HarperCollins, 551 pp., £16.99, July 2000, 0 00 226102 2
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... refusal to speak at length for her characters, to represent directly, for instance, the rage that may haunt their obedience. She speaks another language, or rather two other languages, English and the language of images. Desai’s awareness of these languages is one answer to the question Tabish Khair puts in his intelligent and argumentative book on ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... the building except in the bars, restaurants and ‘any other situation where the dignity of MEPs may be compromised’. So I proposed to film Farage as he went to collect his moolah from the allowances office. As he opens the door, he turns to me and says: ‘Come and film this, it’s a feeding frenzy in here.’ But just as I’m about to do so, a French ...

Inside the Head

John Barrell: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Coleridge: Darker Reflections 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperCollins, 512 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 00 654842 3
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... Holmes observes, in the present volume especially, seem to be as follows. Coleridge’s poetry may be quoted where it appears to throw light on his private life. His prose writings may be discussed only so long as that discussion does not interrupt or retard the narrative: so long, that is, as the writing of a work can ...

A Narrow Band of Liberties

Glen Newey: Global order, 25 January 2001

Profit over People: Neo-Liberalism and Global Order 
by Noam Chomsky.
Seven Stories, 175 pp., £26, October 1998, 1 888363 82 7
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Acts of Aggression: Policing ‘Rogue’ States 
by Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, edited by Edward Said.
Seven Stories, 62 pp., £4.99, May 1999, 1 58322 005 4
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The Umbrella of US Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of US Policy 
by Noam Chomsky.
Seven Stories, 78 pp., £3.99, December 1998, 1 888363 85 1
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The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 199 pp., £30, November 1999, 0 7453 1633 6
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... nothing, but between power and power. This suggests that the landscape is more restricted than it may look. Two main views of international law currently circulate. One sees the limits of state obligation as drawn by self-interest: they’re taken to encompass a limited degree of altruism by citizens towards their compatriots, but not to extend as far as the ...

Slowly/Swiftly

Michael Hofmann: James Schuyler, 7 February 2002

Last Poems 
by James Schuyler.
Slow Dancer, 64 pp., £7.99, January 1999, 1 871033 51 9
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Alfred and Guinevere 
by James Schuyler.
NYRB, 141 pp., £7.99, June 2001, 0 940322 49 8
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... about himself. Unluckily, ‘The sky’ sounds like a play on the poet’s name, and the predicate may perhaps offer clues about his condition (I have seen both the following ascribed to Schuyler): the schizophrenic ‘slowly/swiftly’, or else the bipolar ‘went blue to grey’, a past verb – more, painful, relearning of language – suggesting the ...

Mr Who He?

Stephen Orgel: Shakespeare’s Poems, 8 August 2002

The Complete Sonnets and Poems 
by William Shakespeare, edited by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 750 pp., £65, February 2002, 9780198184317
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... in the medical term ‘proud flesh’. Therefore, whatever Shakespeare intended, the most we may reasonably argue is that both readings are possible; or to put it more strongly, that the two readings are not separable. It should be emphasised, however, that there is no evidence that anyone before 1780 ever read the word as anything but ...

Expendabilia

Hal Foster: Reyner Banham, 9 May 2002

Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future 
by Nigel Whiteley.
MIT, 494 pp., £27.50, January 2002, 0 262 23216 2
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... of ‘Architecture or Revolution’, which concludes Vers une architecture: the architect ‘may have to emulate the Futurists’ or ‘technological culture’ may ‘go on without him’. As Whiteley argues, this revision of modern architecture was not only academic: to study Futurist history was also a way for ...

Gaddafi’s Folly

Andrew Wilson, 27 June 2002

... during 1967, as Jordan resumed work on the Mukheiba Dam to create a reservoir on the Yarmouk. In May, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran and massed troops on the Israeli border in Sinai. Jordan signed a defence pact with Egypt and allowed Iraqi and Saudi troops to enter its territory. On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike, and six days later ...