The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... years and to deploy 6000 National Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...

You better not tell me you forgot

Terry Castle: How to Spot Members of the Tribe, 27 September 2012

All We Know: Three Lives 
by Lisa Cohen.
Farrar Straus, 429 pp., £22.50, July 2012, 978 0 374 17649 5
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... and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
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In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
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Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
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... a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground, apparently dead. When she revives, her father, Leonato, exclaims: Do not ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... the avoidance of which came to be both liberalism’s central aim and its chief selling point. For John Rawls, the most influential exponent of postwar liberalism, Freudianism, like Marxism, ‘destroys the game of reasoning’ by reducing ‘men’s opinions’ to hidden causes, whether repressed wishes or material interests.* In an unpublished paper from ...

Ten Thousand Mile Mistake

Thomas Powers: Robert Stone in Saigon, 18 February 2021

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone 
by Madison Smartt Bell.
Doubleday, 588 pp., £27, March 2020, 978 0 385 54160 2
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The Eye You See With: Selected Non-Fiction 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., £20.99, April 2020, 978 0 618 38624 6
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‘Dog Soldiers’, A Flag for Sunrise’, Outerbridge Reach’ 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Library of America, 1216 pp., £35, March 2020, 978 1 59853 654 6
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... of human life without God as a witness is what drives the novel.The story begins in Vietnam, where John Converse, a former boy-wonder playwright – one play, nothing since – is a war tourist passing through, much in the exploratory mood of Stone himself. Converse is working on a plan to make a fortune with one risky venture – shipping a backpack of cheap ...

Sabotage

Gavin Millar, 13 September 1990

Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles 
by Frank Brady.
Hodder, 655 pp., £18.95, January 1990, 0 340 51389 6
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If this was happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 312 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79630 5
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Norma Shearer 
by Gavin Lambert.
Hodder, 381 pp., £17.95, August 1990, 0 340 52947 4
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Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner 
by Jane Ellen Wayne.
Robson, 268 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 86051 636 9
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Goldwyn: A Biography 
by Scott Berg.
Hamish Hamilton, 579 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 241 12832 3
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The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era 
by Thomas Schatz.
Simon and Schuster, 514 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 671 69708 0
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... Her three husbands had 20 wives. Sinatra seems to have been the serious one. Shooting Mogambo, John Ford gave a party for the British Governor of Uganda and his wife. A man’s man, as they say, Ford thought of a little joke to put Ava on the spot. ‘Why don’t you tell the Governor what you see in that hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married ...

Above it all

Stephen Sedley, 7 April 1994

Suing Judges: A Study of Judicial Immunity 
by Abimbola Olowofoyeku.
Oxford, 234 pp., £27.50, December 1993, 0 19 825793 7
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The Independence of the Judiciary: The View from the Lord Chancellor’s Office 
by Robert Stevens.
Oxford, 221 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 19 825815 1
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... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...

Fifty Years On

Richard Wollheim, 23 June 1994

... and I was determined to escape. Ever since I had been captured, I had thought continuously of John Stuart Mill and the value of liberty. I walked by the side of a New Zealand officer, who, just before being shot down two days before, had been briefed on where the Resistance were in control. We arrived at a farm for the night. I told him that we should ...

Genius in Its Pure State

Mark Ford, 22 May 1997

... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...

Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright, 2 June 1988

Home: A Short History of an Idea 
by Witold Rybczynski.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 434 14292 1
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... families of their donors), and it would soon give rise to a distinct interior aesthetic. Just as John Fowler, who would become the Trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’, James Lees-Milne distinguished the true country-house interior from the ‘contrived “old world” flavour’ of an architect like ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
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... boys’ and ‘honey-sweet sheep bells’ (‘Once in Arcady’), even, in ‘A Rune for Anthony John’, ‘Poecil carpets’. In ‘Sanctuary’, the narrator commands of the flowers, ‘Lie so. Be beautiful’, and they lie so even throughout Day Lewis’s next collection, Country Comets (1928), which is filled with ever more intimations of what, in ...

How Laws Discriminate

Stephen Sedley: The Law’s Inequalities, 29 April 1999

... it lies deeper than the allocation or denial of rights – dependence on which, as my colleague John Laws has argued, is a sign of an immature society. It has to do with a common sense of equity, an ethic of kindness, a morality of feeling, which does not and cannot be expected to stop at a desire for legal justice, even though that is necessarily where the ...

Some Versions of Narrative

Christopher Norris, 2 August 1984

Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects 
edited by Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica.
Massachusetts, 310 pp., February 1984, 0 87023 416 1
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The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge 
by Jean-Francois Lyotard, translated by Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi and Fredric Jameson.
Manchester, 110 pp., £23, August 1984, 0 7190 1450 6
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Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction 
by William Ray.
Blackwell, 228 pp., £17.50, April 1984, 0 631 13457 3
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The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukacs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form 
by J.M. Bernstein.
Harvester, 296 pp., £25, February 1984, 0 7108 0011 8
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Criticism and Objectivity 
by Raman Selden.
Allen and Unwin, 170 pp., £12.50, April 1984, 9780048000231
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... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...

A Time for War

Peter Clarke, 21 October 1982

The Rebirth of Britain 
edited by Wayland Kennet.
Weidenfeld, 275 pp., £12, October 1982, 0 297 78177 4
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Claret and Chips 
by Hugh Stephenson.
Joseph, 201 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 7181 2204 6
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... or true to its traditions if it did not contain sufficient diversity to gratify the ghost of John Stuart Mill. The SDP likewise spans a spectrum of views, as the essays in The Rebirth of Britain abundantly confirm, from the thoroughly decent noblesse oblige of Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler to the radical pluralism of Sue Slipman. Roy Jenkins is ...

The Meaninglessness of Meaning

Michael Wood, 9 October 1986

The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Linda Coverdale.
Cape, 368 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 224 02302 0
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Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith.
Cape, 172 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 224 02267 9
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The Fashion System 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard.
Cape, 303 pp., £15, March 1985, 0 224 02984 3
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The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard.
Blackwell, 312 pp., £19.50, January 1986, 0 631 14746 2
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The Rustle of Language 
by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard.
Blackwell, 373 pp., £27.50, May 1986, 0 631 14864 7
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A Barthes Reader 
edited by Susan Sontag.
Cape, 495 pp., £15, September 1982, 0 224 02946 0
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Barthes: Selected Writings 
edited by Susan Sontag.
Fontana, 495 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 00 636645 7
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Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate 
by Philip Thody.
University of Chicago Press, 203 pp., £6.75, February 1984, 0 226 79513 6
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Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After 
by Annette Lavers.
Methuen, 300 pp., £16.95, September 1982, 0 416 72380 2
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Barthes 
by Jonathan Culler.
Fontana, 128 pp., £1.95, February 1983, 0 00 635974 4
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... context needs the expanded sense it doesn’t always have in English. Barthes is a moralist, as John Sturrock says in Structuralism and Since, because ‘moral passions and distinctions excite him,’ and his apparent flightiness is often a form of scruple, a refusal to lay down a badgering law. Sometimes it is just flightiness. Elements of Semiology both ...