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Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz, 27 May 2010

... life. Even during the age of liberal nationalism after the First World War, when it had a lively parliamentary life, popular sovereignty was sharply curtailed by British power. Since the 1952 coup which brought Nasser to power, it has been ruled by military dictatorship, although the establishment of multi-party politics in the late 1970s brought a ...

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography 
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0
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... neglected his finances; perhaps Pushkin was thinking of him when he wrote that Onegin had read his Adam Smith – unlike his father, who ‘could not understand him,/and mortgaged his lands’. Pushkin’s father was dilettantish and literary; Pushkin’s uncle, Vasily, was an established though mediocre poet, most remarkable, it seems, for his last ...

Manly Love

John Bayley, 28 January 1993

Walt Whitman: From Moon to Starry Night 
by Philip Callow.
Allison and Busby, 394 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 85031 908 0
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The Double Life of Stephen Crane 
by Christopher Benfey.
Deutsch, 294 pp., £17.99, February 1993, 0 233 98820 3
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... of small-time papers, was doing the same thing in the opposite way, among corpses rather than lively bodies. But Whitman, who took to Poe at once and liked his work, had a dark side too, and a sensuous passion for the dead and their graves, for night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his ...

Fake it till you make it

Anthony Grafton: Indexing, 23 September 2021

Index, A History of the 
by Dennis Duncan.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 37423 8
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... a story that Duncan has told in the collection of articles on ‘book parts’ that he edited with Adam Smyth. Making them has remained one of the print professional’s crafts, as Virginia Woolf learned to her displeasure when she wore her eyes out compiling them. (Pulling together an index from a floor littered with little squares of paper wasn’t as ...

That Impostor Known as the Buddha

Eliot Weinberger: Incarnations of the Buddha, 11 September 2014

From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha 
by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Chicago, 289 pp., £18, April 2013, 978 0 226 49320 6
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In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint 
by Donald S. Lopez Jr and Peggy McCracken.
Norton, 262 pp., £17.99, May 2014, 978 0 393 08915 8
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... the Tungus. The Rev. George Stanley Faber, a preacher at Oxford in the early 19th century, added Adam, Noah, the patriarch Enoch, Janus, Hercules and the Cyclops to the list. Moreover, he argued, since ‘Buddha and Woden are the same deity … the theology of the Gothic and Saxon tribes was a modification of Buddhism’. Mindfulness, no doubt, spurred on by ...

Hero as Hero

Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Terrorist, 6 March 2008

Why Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Writings 
by Joseph Wittreich.
Palgrave, 253 pp., £37.99, March 2008, 978 1 4039 7229 3
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... several books. He knows the history of Milton criticism as well as anyone, and treats it as a lively conversation across three centuries, in which Dryden and Addison, Blake and Shelley, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye trade insights with contemporary critics. Wittreich wears great learning lightly, and provides a salutary reminder that there is much worth ...

When it is advisable to put on a fez

Richard Popkin: Adventures of a Messiah, 23 May 2002

The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi 
by John Freely.
Viking, 275 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 670 88675 0
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... and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of Scholem’s ...

Heat-Seeking

Susan Pedersen: A.J.P. Taylor, 10 May 2007

A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe 
by Chris Wrigley.
Tauris, 439 pp., £25, August 2006, 1 86064 286 1
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... penchant for academic squabbling and a string of unconventional marriages. But three biographers? Adam Sisman came first, publishing a lively and well-written study in 1994. Although the scholarly achievements and disappointments were chronicled, Taylor’s personality and public engagements – with the Communist Party ...

Fiction and the Age of Lies

Colin Burrow, 20 February 2020

... was a comedian who did a Bristolian version of the Fall of Man. In the Garden of Eden, God says to Adam: ‘Adam, you bin eating them apples?’ ‘I neverrr,’ Adam replies. God says: ‘What are all them bloody apple cores doing on the ground then?’‘I neverrr’ is the original ...

Nightingales

John Bayley, 15 April 1982

Nightingale Fever: Russian Poets in Revolution 
by Ronald Hingley.
Weidenfeld, 269 pp., £12.95, January 1982, 0 297 77902 8
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Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917-1978 
by Ronald Hingley.
Methuen, 296 pp., £4.95, June 1981, 0 416 31390 6
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The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union 
edited by Archie Brown.
Cambridge, 492 pp., £18.50, February 1982, 0 521 23169 8
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‘Novy Mir’: A Case-Study in the Politics of Literature 1952-1958 
by Edith Frankel.
Cambridge, 206 pp., £19.50, November 1981, 0 521 23438 7
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... that became the new and true elixir. The poets whom Sartre, referring to Villiers de l’Isle Adam and his contemporaries, called ‘Knights of Nothingness’, the kind of poets who had withdrawn into ivory towers, suddenly became guardians of the living flame. While the waves of cant washed over his homeland, it was this solitary poet and not the peasant ...

What’s so good about Reid?

Galen Strawson, 22 February 1990

Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism 
by Norman Daniels.
Stanford, 160 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 8047 1504 1
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Common Sense 
by Lynd Forguson.
Routledge, 193 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 02302 5
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Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ 
by Roger Gallie.
Reidel, 287 pp., £42, July 1989, 0 7923 0390 3
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Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Peter Jones.
John Donald, 230 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 85976 225 4
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Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by M.A. Stewart.
Oxford, 328 pp., £37.50, January 1990, 0 19 824967 5
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Thomas Reid 
by Keith Lehrer.
Routledge, 311 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 415 03886 3
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... into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in 1764, the year in which he succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow. At 70 he retired to prepare his lectures for publication. They appeared as the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and the Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in 1785 and 1788 respectively.Reid had ...

The Case of Adriano Sofri

Carlo Ginzburg, 3 April 1997

... pentiti, and the role they have played, particularly in the Mafia trials, has long been a lively one in Italy. A number of the charges against Andreotti, for example, are based on statements taken from pentiti. Italian law is clear: charges laid by pentiti must be corroborated independently. Marino, however, was confused about the colour of the car ...

Mythic Elements

Stephen Bann, 30 December 1982

Queen of Stones 
by Emma Tennant.
Cape, 160 pp., £6.95, November 1982, 0 224 02601 1
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 
by William Kotzwinkle, based on a screenplay by Melissa Mathison.
Arthur Barker, 246 pp., £6.95, November 1982, 0 213 16848 0
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Tales of Afghanistan 
by Amina Shah.
Octagon Press, 128 pp., £6.50, November 1982, 0 900860 94 4
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The Masque of St Eadmundsburg 
by Humphrey Morrison.
Blond and Briggs, 228 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 85634 127 4
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A Villa in France 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 206 pp., £6.95, October 1982, 0 575 03103 4
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Collected Stories: Vol. III 
by Sean O’Faolain.
Constable, 422 pp., £9.95, November 1982, 0 09 463920 5
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Work Suspended and Other Stories 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 318 pp., £2.75, November 1982, 0 14 006518 0
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... colossally successful film. Michelangelo’s renowned image of God making finger contact with Adam (known to viewers of London Weekend Television through the surrogate emblem of Melvyn Bragg conducting the live electricity of the Arts) has been hijacked for the dust-cover of this generic hybrid. Let us pause before the engaging image of the outstretched ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
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... their first meeting in November 1868, Nietzsche wrote of his exhilaration at this ‘fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very rapidly, [and] is very funny’. For his part, Wagner, then aged 55, seems to have been rejuvenated by his new interlocutor, writing to Nietzsche in 1872: ‘You are, aside from my wife, the one prize I have received in ...

You must not ask

Marina Warner, 4 January 1996

Lewis Carroll: A Biography 
by Morton Cohen.
Macmillan, 592 pp., £25, November 1995, 0 333 62926 4
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The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship 
by John Docherty.
Edwin Mellen, 420 pp., £69.95, July 1995, 0 7734 9038 8
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... banter and jokes and compliments and fuss and names interlaced in acrostics; he took flattering, lively photographs of his friends for keepsakes, and even, as has become notorious, undressed them for the occasion – never without the consent of the mothers. Kisses were his reward: he teases in letters about the giving and the taking of them. The strangeness ...

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