Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
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... by history that it is not particularly rewarding to work towards in fiction. (‘It was 1918,’ John Crace wrote in his ‘Digested Read’ for the Guardian. ‘Everyone had been killed. Except the ones that hadn’t.’) If I were to read it again, I would read it in conjunction with Peacock & Vine (2016), her superb miniature study of William Morris and ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several ...

Theirs and No One Else’s

Nicholas Spice: Conductors’ Music, 16 March 2023

Tár 
directed by Todd Field.
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Richard Wagner’s Essays on Conducting: A New Translation with Critical Commentary 
by Chris Walton.
Rochester, 306 pp., £26.99, February 2021, 978 1 64825 012 5
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In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor 
by Alice Farnham.
Faber, 298 pp., £16.99, January 2023, 978 0 571 37050 4
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... bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his journal that Haydn’s symphonies were also becoming too taxing for him). But for all their technical difficulty, Haydn and Mozart’s later symphonies were still written in the vernacular of the high Classical style – they were ...

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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... on the previous century’s instruments. ‘The violins of Cremona,’ the historian of music John Hawkins wrote in 1776, ‘are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone.’ A French encyclopedia entry on the making of stringed instruments similarly argued that the violins of Jacob Stainer ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: When I Met the Pope, 30 November 2023

... night, we meet on the terrace of a pope-themed hotel – no, seriously, there is a portrait of John Paul II outside the bathroom, caressing his left cheek like an author. The writers are there, and a handful of artists, and Ross and his partner, Ila. Halfway through – I’m not sure how it happens – Hope and I find ourselves at the end of the table ...

Climbing the Ziggurat

Tom Stevenson: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance, 22 January 2026

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping 
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China 
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World 
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
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... in its favourite predilection by describing him as a ‘reformer’ (the BBC correspondent John Simpson predicted that he would mark a break with the ‘stern’ Hu, and speculated about the possibility of an elected parliament). Instead, all prospect of a more open political environment has receded. Dissidence is rare and often treated as treason. Liu ...

Supersensual Ear

Patricia Lockwood: Willa Cather’s Substance, 2 April 2026

The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop 
by Garrett Peck.
New Mexico, 309 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 8263 6925 3
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Death Comes for the Archbishop 
by Willa Cather.
Everyman, 344 pp., £16.99, October 2025, 978 1 85715 089 6
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... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...

The Uninvited

Jeremy Harding: At The Rich Man’s Gate, 3 February 2000

... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. Simpson’s mainstay in France was ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7
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New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0
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The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1
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Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6
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... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... was the more active, but Berlin was to be no less eloquent. Reviewing his current collection, John Dunn has wondered whether Berlin was not always in some ways a deeply unpolitical person, only driven into politics by the threats of Nazism and Communism. The suggestion cannot survive a reading of his essay on Weizmann and the foundation of Israel, the ...

What’s It All About?

Tom Lubbock, 6 April 1995

Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the Nineties 
by Sarah Kent.
Zwemmer, 270 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 302 00648 6
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The Reviews that Caused the Rumpus, and Other Pieces 
by Brian Sewell.
Bloomsbury, 365 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 7475 1872 6
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... were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every purchase, names are made and names are called. But Saatchi’s taste, his collecting policy, is eclectic and elusive. So much art, of so many kinds, has passed into and ...

The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale

Stephen Holmes: ‘The Communist Manifesto’, 29 October 1998

The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition 
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Verso, 82 pp., £8, April 1998, 1 85984 898 2
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... one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.’ Hobsbawm, John Gray and others have claimed that the Manifesto remains a momentous work because it foretold the inexorable course of globalisation. The problem is, Marx did not warn against globalisation: he welcomed it. Indeed he exalted it. It spelled, he thought, the ...

Pseudo-Travellers

Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, 7 February 1985

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict 
by Joan Peters.
Joseph, 601 pp., £15, February 1985, 0 7181 2528 2
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... land can be sold to the Jews without dispossessing Arab cultivators,’ the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, wrote to George V in 1930. ‘Only in a very few places in our colonisation,’ Ben Gurion said at a Zionist Congress in 1937, ‘were we not forced to transfer the earlier residents.’ Clearly, Israel’s first Prime Minister did not think that ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1996, 2 January 1997

... Abbey and carted off the Stone of Scone. No one in Scotland seems in the least impressed with John Major’s imaginative gesture: they’ve got more sense, though with the relic up for grabs there was an undignified scramble between various venues wanting it for its commercial and tourist potential. In this sense it’s very much in the tradition of all ...