Albino Sea-Cucumber

Glen Newey: The Long March of Cornelius Castoriadis, 5 February 1998

The Imaginary Institution of Society 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Polity, 418 pp., £14.95, May 1997, 0 7456 1950 9
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Les Carrefours de Labyrinthe: Fait et a faire 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Seuil, 281 pp., frs 139, February 1997, 2 02 029909 7
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The Castoriadis Reader 
edited by David Ames Curtis.
Blackwell, 470 pp., £50, May 1997, 1 55786 703 8
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... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...
Pluralism and the Personality of the State 
by David Runciman.
Cambridge, 279 pp., £35, June 1997, 0 521 55191 9
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... of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional history, provides the theme for David Runciman’s modestly titled but far-reaching book. Runciman’s study deals not with pluralism in its current, largely sociological, sense of ethnic, cultural, sexual and lifestyle diversity, but with pluralism in its early 20th-century political sense ...

Splashed with Stars

Susannah Clapp: In Stoppardian Fashion, 16 December 2021

Tom Stoppard: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Faber, 977 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 571 31444 7
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... his mother trained as a nurse. When Stoppard was one, the Munich Agreement enabled the Third Reich to annex parts of Czechosl0vakia and the family left for Singapore. When Singapore fell to the Japanese, they set off again. The two boys accompanied their mother, intending to go to Australia but in fact landing in India; their father was to follow ...

Destiny v. Democracy

David Runciman: The New Deal, 25 April 2013

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time 
by Ira Katznelson.
Norton, 706 pp., £22, April 2013, 978 0 87140 450 3
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... attempt to hang him had failed. Nothing so ghastly was permitted on the streets of Hitler’s new Reich. Still, this didn’t stop the Nazis romanticising the South and indulging in soft-soap fantasies about its martial culture. The German edition of Gone with the Wind – Vom Winde verweht – fascinated Hitler when it appeared in 1937. The film too was a ...

Prussian Blues

Fredric Jameson, 17 October 1996

Ein weites Feld 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 784 pp., DM 49.80, August 1995, 3 88243 366 3
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... of all, which Germany the present one continues, except that it is surely not that of Hitler’s Reich. But Weimar, to which so much radical German literature still appeals, was – besides being a victim of that West of which the successor state is the hegemonic power – a failure that it might be unlucky to be identified with; while the second Empire, the ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... in fraternal embrace waving a swastika flag, themselves embraced by the script ‘Ein Volk – Ein Reich – Ein Führer’. There were to be no more Austrian stamps until November 1945.It’s impossible to know whether Donald understood the reason for the sudden disappearance of stamps from the country previously known as Österreich. (I’m sure he ...

Infinite Wibble

Ian Penman: Brian v. Eno, 25 September 2025

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory 
by Brian Eno and Bette A.
Faber, 122 pp., £14.99, January, 978 0 571 39551 4
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A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary 1995 
by Brian Eno.
Faber, 441 pp., £16.99, March 2023, 978 0 571 37462 5
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... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...

Diary

Adam Shatz: Ornette Coleman, 16 July 2015

... 1959 composition ‘Peace’, with Geri Allen on piano. The tenor saxophonists Joe Lovano and David Murray howled their way through Coleman’s most famous tune, ‘Lonely Woman’. There was a haunting duet between Henry Threadgill, on alto flute, and Jason Moran, on piano, and an electric dialogue between the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the tap dancer ...

Rain, Blow, Rustle

Nick Richardson: John Cage, 19 August 2010

No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4'33" 
by Kyle Gann.
Yale, 255 pp., £16.99, April 2010, 978 0 300 13699 9
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... filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a ...

Woolsorters’ Disease

Hugh Pennington: The history of anthrax, 29 November 2001

... to be added to spore suspensions to stop them clumping when they are prepared and dried, but as David Henderson from Porton Down said in 1952, in a journal to be found in any medical school library, ‘fortunately many substances added to the suspension will prevent clumping. The simplest and most effective that has been found is sodium alginate used in ...

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
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... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... at a church in Charleston two years ago. Fields wrote school papers celebrating the Third Reich and shouted racist curses at home, but neither his teachers nor his mother thought to report on his ‘radicalisation’. Even if they had, the government is unlikely to have cared. In February, it was reported that the Trump administration no longer ...

Loot

Ian Buruma, 9 March 1995

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War 
by Lynn Nicholas.
Macmillan, 498 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 333 62652 4
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... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...

Flying Mud

Patrick Parrinder, 8 April 1993

The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells 
by Michael Coren.
Bloomsbury, 240 pp., £20, January 1993, 0 7475 1158 6
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... Karl Pearson, campaigned for eugenic legislation not unlike that eventually adopted in the Third Reich. The alternative, he and his supporters warned, was the ‘rapid multiplication of the unfit’. Progressives like Havelock Ellis, Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb were swayed by these arguments, at least for a time; and Ellis (while condemning the ...

Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9
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... with magic, and with torture and massacre. There should not be many of them, for the Third Reich lasted only 12 years and the Nazi Party before that was very small. Add to this the fact that their trade is illegal in two Western countries, and has to be carried out with a certain discretion in others, and the mixture becomes unbeatable. To the greed ...