From the Inside out

Jacqueline Rose: Eimear McBride, 22 September 2016

The Lesser Bohemians 
by Eimear McBride.
Faber, 313 pp., £16.99, September 2016, 978 0 571 32785 0
Show More
Show More
... I is haunted by some ugly, not quite spoken event. And something that’s never named happens to May Sinclair’s young Harriet Frean down the lane where her parents do not want her to go. With McBride, it is all up front (in your face, as one might say). Seen in this light, the familiar account of modernism starts to look a bit coy or straitlaced. What ...

Schadenfreude with Bite

Richard Seymour: Trolling, 15 December 2016

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture 
by Whitney Phillips.
MIT, 256 pp., £10, September 2016, 978 0 262 52987 7
Show More
Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral 
by Karla Mantilla.
Praeger, 280 pp., £32, August 2015, 978 1 4408 3317 5
Show More
Bad Clowns 
by Benjamin Radford.
New Mexico, 188 pp., £12, February 2016, 978 0 8263 5666 6
Show More
Trolls: An Unnatural History 
by John Lindow.
Reaktion, 60 pp., £9.99, August 2015, 978 1 78023 565 3
Show More
Show More
... troll’s amorality as bound up with the familiar masculinist fantasy of ironclad superiority. It may be that all trolls are, among other things, gendertrolls. If that is true, the troll’s self-image as a ‘trickster’, which Phillips takes seriously, doesn’t stand much scrutiny. The trickster is a figure whose only value is the destruction of ...

Pop your own abscess

Rory Scothorne: Definitions of Poverty, 22 February 2018

The New Poverty 
by Stephen Armstrong.
Verso, 242 pp., £12.99, October 2017, 978 1 78663 463 4
Show More
Poverty Safari 
by Darren McGarvey.
Luath, 244 pp., £7.99, November 2017, 978 1 912147 03 8
Show More
Show More
... the poverty line means these figures probably downplay the true extent of poverty, since people may dip below the threshold multiple times during the year. ‘Hard work’, the rhetorical wedge dividing the working class into classless ‘strivers’ and feckless ‘scroungers’, is now visibly detached from the promise of disposable income or job ...

Constitutional Fantasy

Jan-Werner Müller: Verhofstadt’s Vision, 1 June 2017

Europe’s Last Chance: Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union 
by Guy Verhofstadt.
Basic, 304 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 0 465 09685 5
Show More
Show More
... have to explain why Verhofstadt’s basic argument is wrong. The EU doesn’t work well, and that may be reason enough for some to want to leave, but whoever stays has to face the reality that making the Eurozone and the Union’s common external border – to take just the most glaring failings – function properly will require more integration. Further ...

Episteme, My Arse

Christopher Tayler: Laurent Binet, 15 June 2017

The Seventh Function of Language 
by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor.
Harvill Secker, 390 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 910701 58 4
Show More
Show More
... a mention of a ‘magic, incantatory function’. Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never ...

Cocteaux

Anne Stillman: Jean Cocteau, 13 July 2017

Jean Cocteau: A Life 
by Claude Arnaud, translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell.
Yale, 1024 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 300 17057 3
Show More
Show More
... figure of Oedipus and other paternal ghosts haunting Cocteau’s work, Arnaud speculates that he may have paid ‘with a secret guilt: as if he secretly held himself responsible for a disappearance that had opened up the favours of his mother exclusively to him’. Later in life, mother and son shared an apartment on the rue d’Anjou, with Madame ...

From the Outer Edge

Rory Scothorne: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’, 6 December 2018

Tom Nairn: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’? 
by Neal Ascherson.
Democratic Left Scotland, 27 pp., £4, February 2018
Show More
Show More
... Their ‘evil mélange of decrepit Presbyterianism and imperialist thuggery, whose spirit may be savoured by a few mornings with the Edinburgh Scotsman and a few evenings watching Scottish Television, appears to be solidly represented in the Scottish National Party.’ The version of nationalism represented by the SNP offered no hope: they were ...

Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
Show More
Show More
... or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof [were] darkened by the annoyance of one of the next neighbours’ building.’ The scrupulous cleanliness of the studio, ‘where neither dust, smoke, noise nor stench ...

Whatever Made Him

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Bauman Dichotomy, 10 September 2020

Bauman: A Biography 
by Izabela Wagner.
Polity, 510 pp., £25, June, 978 1 5095 2686 4
Show More
Show More
... for political education and morale. With this Soviet Polish Army he fought his way to Berlin in May 1945. In June ownership of his division was transferred to Poland, under the Moscow-approved government in waiting of Bołeslaw Bierut, and it was as a member of what was now the Polish Internal Security Corps, the KBW, that Bauman went to Warsaw.Bauman’s ...

To King’s Cross Station

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Lenin’s London, 7 January 2021

The Spark That Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics That Changed the World 
by Robert Henderson.
I.B.Tauris, 270 pp., £17.99, March 2020, 978 1 78453 862 0
Show More
Show More
... her from the pictures. As a young woman she was lively-looking and attractive (‘rare beauty’ may be going too far), but her face becomes more strained over time, the expression more set. She and Takhtarev returned to Russia in 1906, and she gave birth to a son, Misha, not long after, when she must have been almost forty. But then the story turns sad: she ...

Hurt in the Guts

Joe Dunthorne: A Masterpiece and a Disaster, 1 April 2021

Michael Kohlhaas 
by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann.
New Directions, 112 pp., £11.99, April 2020, 978 0 8112 2834 3
Show More
Show More
... than those of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ...

A Mystery to Itself

Rivka Galchen: What is a brain?, 22 April 2021

The Idea of the Brain 
by Matthew Cobb.
Profile, 470 pp., £12.99, March 2021, 978 1 78125 590 2
Show More
The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist’s Guide to Stem Cell Therapy 
by Jack Price.
MIT, 270 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 0 262 04375 5
Show More
Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain 
by David Eagleman.
Canongate, 316 pp., £20, August 2020, 978 1 83885 096 8
Show More
Show More
... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography 
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3
Show More
Show More
... him how to look at painting. Though still in high school, Bois is swept up by the events of May 1968, after which he connects radical art with radical politics whenever he can, an avant-garde commitment that is affirmed when he meets the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark two years later. In 1969, aged seventeen, Bois is offered an opportunity to exhibit his ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 78396 634 9
Show More
Show More
... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...

Monumental Folly

Michael Kulikowski: Heliogabalus’ Appetites, 30 November 2023

The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome 
by Harry Sidebottom.
Oneworld, 338 pp., £10.99, October, 978 0 86154 685 5
Show More
Show More
... and treat the army as it deserved to be treated. Sympathetic commanders were canvassed. On 15 May 218, Heliogabalus, Maesa, Soaemias and the boy’s tutor left Emesa under cover of darkness for the camp of the Legio III Gallica at Raphaneae. Their reception there was not guaranteed, but they were hopeful. The legion, despite its name, had been quartered ...