Assault on Freud

Arnold Davidson, 5 July 1984

Freud: The Assault on Truth 
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.
Faber, 308 pp., £9.95, May 1984, 0 571 13240 5
Show More
Show More
“... insincerity very closely, since the passage exemplifies Masson’s inability to read a text, and may serve as an emblem for his interpretative inadequacies. So here are the passges to which Masson refers. First, from the Three Essays, in the section on ‘The Return of Early Infantile Masturbation’: I shall have to speak presently of the internal ...”

The Leg

Oliver Sacks, 17 June 1982

“... and the sense of a yawning hole. I did not just feel ‘a leg’ was missing, as a button may be missing off one’s coat: I felt that part of me, of my person, was missing; and, in consequence, I felt radically diminished. It was only several years later that I came to read The Case of George Dedlow, an imaginary case-history of a physician who had ...”

Diary

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: The Turkish Left, 8 August 2013

“... When at the end of May protesters in Istanbul began their occupation of Gezi Park, to stop its planned transformation into a mall, they also built barricades on the streets surrounding it. Some of the barricades were ad hoc structures: plant pots, rubbish bins, paving slabs and an occasional street sign, assembled hastily at night and lost to the police in the morning ...”

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

“... a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no attention. In May 1993, 11 months before the extermination of the Tutsis began, I warned that ‘genocide’ was looming. But I also fell victim to the RPF’s manipulation of the press: I wrote about the supposed activities of the so-called Zero Network – presidential death ...”

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
Show More
Show More
“... been deteriorating, according to the Ipswich Star’s report of the inquest, since the previous May. His wife, Zoe, told the inquest that they had been seeking help for him, but the local NHS trust hadn’t been able to offer anything beyond a telephone chat with a GP. ‘The hospital services are always attentive and on the ball, but once you leave ...”

Saving Masud Khan

Wynne Godley, 22 February 2001

“... after it has taken place and processed in an internal theatre. On the one hand, the subject may be bafflingly insensitive but this goes with extreme vulnerability, for the whole apparatus can only function within a framework of familiar and trusted responses. He or she is defenceless against random, unexpected or malicious events. Evil cannot be ...”

Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
Show More
Show More
“... and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last significant French landing, at Fishguard in 1797, had momentous consequences. The fifteen hundred French ...”

Horny Robot Baby Voice

James Vincent: On AI Chatbots, 10 October 2024

“... how to build intimacy or deal with conflicts. It seems constructive, particularly for people who may be drawn to chatbots precisely because in-person interaction feels freighted with risk. Unlike on erotica apps, the conversations are banal and benign. My own chatbot, Jane, was upbeat, encouraging and very infantilising: ‘Hey there, sleepyhead! I’m wide ...”

Aloha, aloha

Ian Hacking, 7 September 1995

What ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 316 pp., £19.95, July 1995, 0 226 73368 8
Show More
Show More
“... nautical uncle) than to those grown-up girls who did not. And even a Treasure Island boy (or girl) may tire of Sahlins’s fecund pun-machine. The fact is that Treasure Island is a pale pastiche of the real, wonderful journals of our navigators and their crews. Take the ‘Private Signals’ for the final voyage, which lasted four years, for use in the event ...”

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
Show More
Show More
“... too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Madness: The Movie, 9 February 1995

“... Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the panelling or covered in ...”

The Past’s Past

Thomas Laqueur, 19 September 1996

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History 
by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 310 pp., £12.95, September 1996, 0 521 49682 9
Show More
Show More
“... least the expressions of emotion – that one can see manifested every day at the Vietnam Memorial may well bespeak ancient, perhaps primordial, human wishes: to feed the dead, to seek the approval of ancestors, to inform them of the affairs of the living, to express to them sorrow at their loss. But their expression finds space not through the historical or ...”

My Mad Captains

Frank Kermode, 14 December 1995

“... whose problems are likely to be worse than the patient’s? However much persons of that sort may be supposed to know, in principle, about making sense of life, it’s a fair assumption that they have become extremely unhappy in the course of acquiring their information. Of course I disagree with Sophocles when he advises us to call no man happy, for I ...”

After Gibraltar

Conor Gearty, 16 November 1995

“... on the military plan with firearms, request that you proceed with the military option which may include the use of lethal force for the preservation of life.’ This was questionable language in which to couch what was supposedly an instruction to arrest. All the contradictions and inconsistencies in this sequence of events would be instantly resolved ...”

Terror on the Vineyard

Terry Castle: Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, 15 April 1999

A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman 
by Rosemary Mahoney.
Doubleday, 273 pp., $23.95, November 1998, 9780385479318
Show More
Show More
“... and other detachable body parts left dripping in gore around the house. A variety of situations may propel such fury. In Euripides’ Electra, Western civilisation’s mythic prototype for female-on-female mayhem, the rebel is an Outraged Daughter and the boss lady her Wicked Old Mother: Clytemnestra’s doom is sealed when she puts her sex life ahead of ...”