We demand cloisters!

Tom Stammers: Artists’ Studios, 29 June 2023

The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History 
by James Hall.
Thames and Hudson, 345 pp., £30, November 2022, 978 0 500 52171 7
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... The erosion of the academic system by market pressures, and its temporary abolition during the French Revolution, accentuated the studio’s function as an entrepreneurial space. In the wonderfully vivid ensembles that Boilly staged in the studios of the painter Isabey (in 1798) and the sculptor Houdon (in 1804) we can see the affirmation of these ...

A Diverse Collection of Peoples

Daniel Lazare: Shlomo Sand v. Zionism, 20 June 2013

The Invention of the Jewish People 
by Shlomo Sand.
Verso, 344 pp., £9.99, June 2010, 978 1 84467 623 1
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The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland 
by Shlomo Sand.
Verso, 295 pp., £16.99, January 2013, 978 1 84467 946 1
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... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

... a first and a last in Western Europe. In its wake there were tangible gains for the majority of French citizens. Two militants at a Peugeot assembly plant in Franche-Comté were killed by security forces in the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on strike – one was shot, the other forced to jump off a bridge, or some say a wall – but no one ...

Sacred Parallelogram

Rosemary Hill: Women Paint Women, 23 April 2026

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway 
by Diane Boucher.
Unicorn, 351 pp., £27.99, June 2025, 978 1 916846 78 4
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Souvenirs 
by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.
David Zwirner, 184 pp., £10.95, May 2025, 978 1 64423 162 3
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... several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had no idea of being in competition with her. They all travelled and exhibited internationally to varying degrees of acclaim. Their careers required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal ...

Writing and Publishing

Alan Sillitoe, 1 April 1982

... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is similar. Perez is interested in ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’, but thinks that what distinguishes them is their variousness. ‘Most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something ...

Slicing and Mauling

Anne Hollander: The Art of War, 6 November 2003

From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550-1672 
by David Kunzle.
Brill, 645 pp., £64, November 2002, 90 04 12369 5
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... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...

The UN and Rwanda

Linda Melvern, 12 December 1996

... The invasion demonstrated the RPF’s potential military superiority. With help from the French, the Rwandese government forces repelled the attack, but the invasion served to encourage opposition to one-party rule, while the RPF continued to mount attacks from territory it held inside Rwanda and along the Ugandan border. The Government began to ...

What’s the point of HS2?

Christian Wolmar, 17 April 2014

... To counter the objections, the case for HS2 needs to be overwhelming. And it is not. The French use their LGV (Lignes à Grande Vitesse) for postal services as well as passenger trains and the TGV shares the tracks with conventional services at the Paris terminuses, but broadly speaking, high-speed railways are the motorways of the rail network: they ...

Diary

John Lanchester: A Month on the Sofa, 11 July 2002

... be good. 11 June. France 0 Denmark 2. Ireland 3 Saudi Arabia 0. Hee hee. What smug twerps the French have been, both on the pitch and by not rebuilding the team after winning the Cup in 1998. They didn’t even look as if they were trying all that hard until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... the volume of academic literature about them, where the legendary overproduction of writing by the French about their national icons – there are three thousand books on de Gaulle, five times as many as on Churchill – needs to be taken into account. A more significant index is translation. On the centenary of Du côté de chez Swann, a colloquium could ...

I am a severed head

Colin Burrow: Iris Murdoch’s Incompatibilities, 11 August 2016

‘The Sea, the Sea’; ‘A Severed Head’ 
by Iris Murdoch.
Everyman, 680 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 1 84159 370 8
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... Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze significantly ...

Derridiarry

Richard Stern, 15 August 1991

... his short hair pure white. With glasses, he looks like an upper-level, not absolutely top-grade French bureaucrat, an administrator in a colonial territory (such as the Algeria in which he spent his early life). Without glasses, he could pass for a French movie star, a mix of Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. A witty local ...

’Oly, ’Oly, ’Oly

D.A.N. Jones, 20 December 1990

From Early Life 
by William Cooper.
Macmillan, 180 pp., £13.95, August 1990, 0 333 52367 9
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Son of Adam 
by Denis Forman.
Deutsch, 201 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 9780233985930
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A Welsh Childhood 
by Alice Thomas Ellis and Patrick Sutherland.
Joseph, 186 pp., £15.99, September 1990, 0 7181 3292 0
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Alarms and Excursions: Thirty Years in Israel 
by Naomi Shepherd.
Collins, 220 pp., £16, August 1990, 0 00 215333 5
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Birds of Ill Omen 
by Marie Seurat, translated by Dorothy Blair.
Quartet, 168 pp., £10.95, September 1990, 0 7043 2694 9
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... do at the ceremony, in deference to his orthodox kinsmen. This was in 1978, shortly after the Camp David Accords with the Egyptian Government of Sadat. Shepherd was one of those alarmed by Israel’s new right-wing government, headed by Menachem Begin: religious parties allied themselves with the right-wingers, rejecting Labour and the old ...

Judicial Politics

Stephen Sedley, 23 February 2012

... world to develop a coherent scheme of public or administrative law’; yet, he says, ‘successive French constitutions from 1799 to 1958 have been characterised by a persistent hostility to judicial interference with the two other branches of the state.’ If this is literally the case, it is simply because judicial oversight of public administration is ...