Like a Mullet in Love

James Wood: Homage to Verga, 10 August 2000

Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories 
by Giovanni Verga, translated by G.H. McWilliam.
Penguin, 272 pp., £8.99, June 1999, 0 14 044741 5
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“... at Ragoleti, and get him to hand over the three onze and twelve sacks of grain owing to me from May up to the present.’ But Jeli corrects him: ‘No, it’s only two and a quarter, because you left the cows over a month ago, and you mustn’t steal from the hand that feeds you.’ ‘That’s true!’ his father agrees, and promptly dies. This is a scene ...”

The Egg-Head’s Egger-On

Christopher Hitchens: Saul Bellow keeps his word (sort of), 27 April 2000

Ravelstein 
by Saul Bellow.
Viking, 254 pp., £16.99, April 2000, 0 670 89131 2
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“... law’. This very trope currently forms the moral cement of the American Right. There may or may not be a suggestive and contradictory connection between ‘Ravelstein’s’ secretive sex life and his attachment to arcane doctrines – between the erotic and the esoteric – but Bellow can’t seem to be ...”

Cartwheels over Broken Glass

Andrew O’Hagan: Worshipping Morrissey, 4 March 2004

Saint Morrissey 
by Mark Simpson.
SAF, 224 pp., £16.99, December 2003, 0 946719 65 9
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The Smiths: Songs that Saved Your Life 
by Simon Goddard.
Reynolds/Hearn, 272 pp., £14.99, December 2002, 1 903111 47 1
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“... Mist. Readers who find the foregoing facts a bit irregular – that’s to say, untypical – may never have had the pleasure of Fred and Judy Vermorel’s excellent Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans, a book which has no trouble persuading you that the desires and preoccupations of fans are the most beautiful and worrying things about modern pop. Here’s ...”

Enemies of Hindutva

Tariq Ali: The BJP defeat, 8 July 2004

Nehru: A Political Life 
by Judith Brown.
Yale, 407 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 300 09279 2
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Nehru 
by Benjamin Zachariah.
Routledge, 336 pp., £10.99, April 2004, 9780415250177
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“... every Indian pollster forecast another BJP triumph before the election results were announced in May. Few believed that the Italian-born head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty could lead the Congress-dominated alliance to victory. In the 1990s, threatened by a possible challenge from Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, Bill Clinton declared that the American ...”

Victory in Defeat

Neal Ascherson: Trotsky, 2 December 2004

The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-21 
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 497 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 441 3
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The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-29 
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 444 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 446 4
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The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-40 
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 512 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 451 0
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“... is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as ...”

Don’t like it? You don’t have to play

Wyatt Mason: David Foster Wallace, 18 November 2004

Oblivion: Stories 
by David Foster Wallace.
Abacus, 329 pp., £12, July 2004, 0 349 11810 8
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“... right." The 48 pages of ‘Oblivion’ have been a dream. The narrator’s perspective, which we may have found insufferable, repetitive, pompous or even momentarily criminal, isn’t the husband’s at all. Although we might be tempted to suppose that the dream has been his (after all, we’ve believed we were hearing his voice all along), an unhurried ...”

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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“... Wordsworth’s hopes and criticisms, on the other hand, are brought sympathetically to light. She may have been her husband’s amanuensis, but she was not an uncritical one, and had a keen eye – or rather, ear – for his dwindling poetic ambitions. In particular, she was privately dismissive of his mid-life addiction to the making of sonnets ...”

‘Disgusting’

Frank Kermode: Remembering William Empson, 16 November 2006

William Empson. Vol. II: Against the Christians 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 797 pp., £30, November 2006, 0 19 927660 9
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“... the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise of her freedom may have caused Empson some pain; he missed her badly when she went off to Hong Kong for a year with a lover, and seems to have been a little unhappy when she added illegitimately to the family (possibly, as Haffenden suggests, more because of his sense of ...”

Enjoying every moment

David Reynolds: Ole Man Churchill, 7 August 2003

Churchill 
by John Keegan.
Weidenfeld, 181 pp., £14.99, November 2002, 0 297 60776 6
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Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 
by John Ramsden.
HarperCollins, 652 pp., £9.99, September 2003, 0 00 653099 0
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Clementine Churchill: The Revised and Updated Biography 
by Mary Soames.
Doubleday, 621 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 385 60446 7
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Churchill at War 1940-45 
by Lord Moran.
Constable, 383 pp., £9.99, October 2002, 1 84119 608 8
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Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy 
by Klaus Larres.
Yale, 583 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 300 09438 8
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“... streets named after Churchill (more than 150 in Australia, only one in Cornwall). And many readers may find three chapters on Australia and New Zealand more than they need, especially when the complex reactions to him in France and Germany are covered in one broad-brush chapter on ‘Churchill and the Europeans’. The book is invaluable nonetheless, as the ...”

Pseudo-Couples

Fredric Jameson: Kenzaburo Oe, 20 November 2003

Somersault 
by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by Philip Gabriel.
Atlantic, 570 pp., £16.99, July 2003, 1 84354 080 0
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“... to escape the ‘monologic’ perspective of the ideology or set of opinions or beliefs the author may have held in real life. With Oe, too, it might be preferable to dissociate the author from ideas he merely seems to endorse (I will touch on the ‘sacrificial’ and on religion itself later on); and where the Naturalists might have offered us a ...”

Partnership of Loss

Roy Foster: Ireland since 1789, 13 December 2007

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 
by Paul Bew.
Oxford, 613 pp., £35, August 2007, 978 0 19 820555 5
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“... would have led. As it was, the 1830s would see O’Connell in alliance with the Whigs, a link that may have moderated his course as effectively as Parnell’s combination with the Gladstonian Liberals between 1886 and 1890. The failure of the next great popular movement, to ‘repeal’ the Union, and the rise of romantic nationalism in the Young Ireland ...”

A National Evil

Jonah Goodman, 30 November 2023

“... precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes. He was 34 when, in May 1914, he stood up to speak at the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society. Everyone was looking in the wrong place, he said. The cause of the conditions was not a germ or genetic defect, but something missing. Not an agent, but an absence.Touch​ your neck, just above ...”

Stay away from politics

William Davies: Why Weber?, 21 September 2023

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber 
by Wendy Brown.
Harvard, 132 pp., £19.95, April 2023, 978 0 674 27938 4
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“... policy efforts to marketise by design.The second story about universities is the one that may be more familiar to those who have looked on from a distance. Across the Western world in the 1960s, campuses were crucibles of politicisation and left-wing organisation, shaping the ‘new social movements’ that followed in subsequent decades. But a ...”

Hate Burst Out

Kim Phillips-Fein: Chicago, 1968, 15 August 2024

The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 
by Luke A. Nichter.
Yale, 370 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 300 25439 6
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“... and beaten in the process. (The events at Columbia helped to inspire the uprisings in France in May 1968.) Early in June, Kennedy, whose ability to tap into the civil rights movement might have enabled him to translate anti-war activism into electoral appeal, was assassinated by a Palestinian man who claimed he had acted out of anger at Kennedy’s support ...”

A Pox on the Poor

Steven Shapin: The First Vaccine, 4 February 2021

The Great Inoculator: The Untold Story of Daniel Sutton and His Medical Revolution 
by Gavin Weightman.
Yale, 216 pp., £16.99, August 2020, 978 0 300 24144 0
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“... of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of dying, though some outbreaks killed 50 per cent of the afflicted. Now smallpox is no more. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared it ...”