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Thank God for Dynamite

Greg Afinogenov: Victor Serge in the Archives, 6 March 2025

What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression: A Guide for Activists 
by Victor Serge, translated by Judith White.
Seven Stories, 146 pp., £12.99, June 2024, 978 1 64421 367 4
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Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia 
by Stuart Finkel.
Oxford, 318 pp., £90, July 2024, 978 0 19 891610 9
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... in the press. In 1890, George Kennan gave a shocking account of the Siberian exile system, leading Mark Twain to announce that ‘if such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite.’As a young man, Serge drifted into the Parisian anarchist underworld, known for its campaign of bombings and assassinations ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
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Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
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Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
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The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
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... A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English humour’ too. He was too near academe to be a cracker-barrel philosopher. His style was zestful, easy and lucid, free from tags and ...

Wounds

Stephen Fender, 23 June 1988

Hemingway 
by Kenneth Lynn.
Simon and Schuster, 702 pp., £16, September 1987, 0 671 65482 9
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The Faces of Hemingway: Intimate Portraits of Ernest Hemingway by those who knew him 
by Denis Brian.
Grafton, 356 pp., £14.95, May 1988, 0 246 13326 0
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... Hemingway who struggled with his parents and killed them off in various fictional displacements. Mark Twain did it too. So did J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth. Popular American fiction is full of adolescent crises: of good-bad boys running away from home, escaping one form of captivity only to wind up in another as suitable cases for treatment. It is not ...

Joan and Jill

V.G. Kiernan, 15 October 1981

Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism 
by Marina Warner.
Weidenfeld, 349 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 9780297776383
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... Joan found an impressive galaxy of admirers abroad, as multifarious as Southey and Coleridge, Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw. It was inevitable that she should find her way onto the stage, and, with Gounod, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, into grand opera. This might have been thought the grand finale of her death-and-transfiguration, but there was still another ...
Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered 
by William Pritchard.
Oxford, 186 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 19 503462 7
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... sounds to its prosaic counterpart: the distinctively American vernacular prose style developed by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and company. The absence of historical depth is also evident where Pritchard is at his best: in his sensitive discussion of Frost’s most admired and distinctive poems, the pastoral lyrics. (The working title for North of Boston ...

Why couldn’t she be fun?

Lavinia Greenlaw: Nico gets her own back, 24 February 2022

You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico 
by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike.
Faber, 512 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 571 35001 8
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... get a needle into her worn-out veins. She died that day. Ari said that she had put a volume of Mark Twain in her pocket before she set out. In the version of the story in which the couple found her, she was clutching a book by Oscar ...

This is a book review

Geoffrey Hawthorn: John Searle, 20 January 2011

Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilisation 
by John Searle.
Oxford, 208 pp., £14.99, January 2010, 978 0 19 957691 3
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... distinction Frege had drawn between their sense and reference (the difference between saying that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying that Samuel Clemens did – Clemens was Twain’s real name – where the sense, the cognitive significance, is different but the reference is the same); a great will, too, to ...

A New Interpretation of Dreams

Jeffrey Saver, 4 August 1988

The Dreaming Brain 
by Allan Hobson.
Basic Books, 319 pp., $22.95, March 1988, 0 465 01703 7
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... unsound. We have, however, heard all this, or something rather like it, before. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone has complained about Freudian theory but no one has done anything about it. Bloodied but unbowed by a century of critique, the Freudian outlook continues to be taught in our classrooms and applied in our clinics. Though they have ...

Portrait of a Failure

Daniel Aaron, 25 January 1990

Henry Adams 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 504 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 9780674387355
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The Letters of Henry Adams: Vols I-VI 
edited by J.C Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins-Winner.
Harvard, 2016 pp., £100.75, July 1990, 0 674 52685 6
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... a seismographic intelligence. Like Kinglake and Evelyn Waugh, he resorted to comic hyperbole; like Mark Twain, he dramatised his disenchantments and was a great one for sweeping half-facetious generalisation: Greece was a fraud, Poland dreary, Australia a bore, Japan primitive, Java a ‘disappointment’, India ‘a huge nightmare, with cobras and ...

Mrs Berlioz

Patrick Carnegy, 30 December 1982

Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz 
by Peter Raby.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £12.95, September 1982, 0 521 24421 8
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Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves and Legends of Adah Isaacs Menken 
by Wolf Mankowitz.
Blond and Briggs, 270 pp., £10.95, September 1982, 0 85634 119 3
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... in Paris in 1868 after a whirlwind career not short on literary friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady of Pain’, though the poet confided to Edmund Gosse that she was deficient as a lover, in that she tended to wake early and recite her ...

Peter Conrad’s Flight from Precision

Richard Poirier, 17 July 1980

Imagining America 
by Peter Conrad.
Routledge, 319 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 7100 0370 6
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... his regime around regular mealtimes and early nights, re-creating in his apartment on St Mark’s Place the squalor of the nursery.’ And one last, summary example: ‘Auden’s rebarbativeness, which became progressively fouler and nastier over the years, was the sign of his refusal to allow himself to feel at home anywhere. Prizing his own ...

Retro-Selfies

Iain Sinclair: Ferlinghetti, 17 December 2015

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 
edited by Bill Morgan.
City Lights, 284 pp., £11.83, July 2015, 978 0 87286 678 2
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Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson.
Liveright, 464 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 1 63149 001 9
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... performer, painter and publisher, was so honoured, along with a catalogue of deceased luminaries: Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac. Via Ferlinghetti, formerly known as Price Row, is a dead-end off Union Street in San Francisco. It was dedicated on 24 April 1994 in a ceremony attended by ...

As if Life Depended on It

John Mullan: With the Leavisites, 12 September 2013

Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English 
by David Ellis.
Liverpool, 151 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 1 84631 889 4
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English as a Vocation: The ‘Scrutiny’ Movement 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Oxford, 298 pp., £57, May 2012, 978 0 19 969517 1
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The Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow 
by F.R. Leavis.
Cambridge, 118 pp., £10.99, August 2013, 978 1 107 61735 3
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... misuse of the mind that makes it an enemy of life’. ‘That misuse is a distinctive mark of our scientifico-industrial civilisation.’ Lawrence is rescuing life from ‘inner mechanisation’, and Leavis is with him on the mission. We live in ‘a world of mass democracy, statistical truths and computers that can write poems’. The pejorative ...

A National Evil

Jonah Goodman, 30 November 2023

... but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre, a bulge of flesh protruding from the front of the neck, sometimes so large that it weighed on the windpipe, giving bearers a characteristic wheeze. It was often disguised by collars and high necklines, but its true extent is laid bare by ...

Behind the Sandwall

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Shame, 23 February 2006

Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony? 
by Toby Shelley.
Zed, 215 pp., £16.95, November 2004, 1 84277 341 0
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... Even so, you can’t help feeling it requires the talents of a comic genius – perhaps a Mark Twain, whose satire on King Leopold’s Congo was so astute – to lay the thing bare in all its painful absurdity. A modern-day Twain might have received the following outline from his researchers and gone on to ...

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