Wobblibility

Christopher Tayler: Aleksandar Hemon, 23 May 2013

The Book of My Lives 
by Aleksandar Hemon.
Picador, 224 pp., £20, March 2013, 978 1 4472 1090 0
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... programme run by the United States Information Agency. Deciding not to use his return ticket on 1 May that year didn’t take great foresight: Serb units were already in place round Sarajevo and on 2 May the blockade began in earnest. Hemon, in Chicago, applied for political asylum and took any job he could find ...

Clutching at Railings

Jonathan Coe: Late Flann O’Brien, 24 October 2013

Plays and Teleplays 
by Flann O’Brien, edited by Daniel Keith Jernigan.
Dalkey, 434 pp., £9.50, September 2013, 978 1 56478 890 0
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The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien 
edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper.
Dalkey, 158 pp., £9.50, August 2013, 978 1 56478 889 4
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... one do with a suggestion? One throws it out. For what does one throw a suggestion out? For what it may be worth. In one of his last columns, published in March 1966, O’Brien looked back on his catechism, compiled more than twenty years earlier, and described it as ‘an exegetic survey of the English language in its extremity of logo-daedalate ...

Peroxide and Paracetamol

Adam Mars-Jones: Alison MacLeod, 12 September 2013

Unexploded 
by Alison MacLeod.
Hamish Hamilton, 340 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 0 241 14263 9
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... each historical fact in a single work. This novel features major and minor events from the period May 1940 to June 1941. This said, it should not be taken as an entirely accurate historical record of that year. This seems reasonable. The past can legitimately be bent a little, to make a shape, but not broken. There are wobbles early on, such as Geoffrey ...

It wasn’t a dream

Ned Beauman: Christopher Priest, 10 October 2013

The Adjacent 
by Christopher Priest.
Gollancz, 432 pp., £12.99, June 2013, 978 0 575 10536 2
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... anything to develop or explain the provocative setting, though you keep expecting him to, which may be the point.) As the book begins, Tarent has just returned from a humanitarian expedition to Anatolia, during which his wife was killed by terrorists. Because the bomb used seems to have employed a mysterious new concept in quantum physics called ...

Past Its Peak

Robert Vitalis: The Oil Curse, 17 December 2009

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil 
by Peter Maass.
Allen Lane, 276 pp., £20, October 2009, 978 1 84614 246 8
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... midst of oil booms. Maass can’t be held responsible for all the wrongheaded thinking his book may encourage, but he might at least have considered the difference between correlation and causation. There are factual mistakes, too, in Maass’s account, specifically in his discussion of Saudi Arabia, the area I know best. Osama bin Laden’s ...

Syzygy

Galen Strawson: Brain Chic, 25 March 2010

36 Arguments for the Existence of God 
by Rebecca Goldstein.
Atlantic, 402 pp., £12.99, March 2010, 978 1 84887 153 3
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... a particular person? … It can seem that as far as what I really am is concerned, any relation I may have to TN or any other objectively specified person must be accidental and arbitrary. I may occupy TN or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person … The experiences and the ...

Evil Just Is

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The Italian Inquisition, 13 May 2010

The Italian Inquisition 
by Christopher Black.
Yale, 330 pp., £35, November 2009, 978 0 300 11706 6
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... diligent array of evidence: contemporary contempt and hatred for the work of inquisitions. Some may regard it as poetic justice that the Dominican patron saint of inquisitors, Peter Martyr, ended his days hacked down with an axe by an angry Cathar in 1252. Among the necessary expenses for Paolo Costabili, the inquisitor of Ferrara in the 1560s, were extra ...

Ahead of the Game

Daniel Finn: The Official IRA, 7 October 2010

The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party 
by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar.
Penguin, 658 pp., £9.99, April 2010, 978 0 14 102845 3
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... In May 1977, Ian Paisley was in a television studio in Belfast when he bumped into Malachy McGurran, a leader of the Official IRA in Northern Ireland. At that time, Paisley was attempting to orchestrate a repeat of the loyalist workers’ strike that had defeated the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement three years earlier ...

Still Their Fault

Bernard Porter: The AK-47, 6 January 2011

The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War 
by C.J. Chivers.
Allen Lane, 481 pp., £25, November 2010, 978 0 7139 9837 5
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... with every pick-up truck he sold. (The voucher was for the semi-automatic version. US gun laws may be liberal, but they do have limits.) More to the point: the Kalashnikov has probably killed more people than any other hand-held weapon in history. That makes it one of the great industrial success stories of modern times. It was, of course, a Soviet ...

One Kidnapping Away

Tim Whitmarsh: ‘How to Manage Your Slaves’, 3 December 2015

How to Manage Your Slaves 
by Marcus Sidonius Falx, with Jerry Toner.
Profile, 224 pp., £8.99, May 2015, 978 1 78125 251 2
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... bounded by northern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Of these, as many as one in eight may have been slaves, whether suffering in Spanish silver mines, tilling the soil on a nobleman’s Italian estate, teaching the young their letters or serving at banquets. Unfree labour was part of the Roman world. The idea of slavery structured the language of ...

Diary

Peter Parsons: Rooting around Oxyrhyncus, 4 June 2015

... you can still read some edifying verses, in red letters two centimetres high: To my students: O may the god incline to hear my prayer That all may learn the Muses’ honeyed fare And, by the Graces’ aid, and Maia’s son, The heights of Rhetoric be wholly won. My boys, be brave: our great god will impart The victor’s ...

Globalisation before Globalisation

Philippe Marlière: The Paris Commune, 2 July 2015

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 
by John Merriman.
Yale, 324 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 0 300 17452 6
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Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune 
by Kristin Ross.
Verso, 148 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 1 78168 839 7
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... and the people of Paris. Half of his 300 pages are devoted to the ‘semaine sanglante’ of 21-28 May during which the national army retook control of the capital after slaughtering as many as 25,000 civilians and combatants. He gives a vivid and grisly account of the street fighting, including the army’s use of machine guns to perform mass ...

They were all foreigners

Michael Kulikowski: ‘SPQR’, 7 January 2016

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome 
by Mary Beard.
Profile, 606 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 84668 380 0
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... murders, and more battles. The openness was already there in the myth of fratricide: Romulus may have killed his brother, but he also welcomed all comers to his merry band of cut-throats on the Capitoline Hill. The Sabines became Romans, too, when the kidnapped women stepped between the raging armies and refused to allow their husbands and brothers to ...

Thirty-Five States to Go

David Cole: America’s Death Penalty, 3 March 2011

Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition 
by David Garland.
Oxford, 417 pp., £21.99, September 2010, 978 0 19 959499 3
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... answerable to the people is less vulnerable to the charge that it is anti-democratic. And it may also give rise to fewer objections precisely because it seems less ‘final’, more easily altered. A constitutional decision imposed by an unelected court, by contrast, dramatically raises the stakes. The Supreme Court in Furman did not help matters by ...

In Myrtle Bowers

Blair Worden: Cavaliers, 30 June 2011

Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War 
by John Stubbs.
Viking, 549 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 0 670 91753 2
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... as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we tour the agonised mind of the Scottish Calvinist Sir ...