Joyce and Company

Tim Parks: Joyce’s Home Life, 5 July 2012

James Joyce: A Biography 
by Gordon Bowker.
Phoenix, 608 pp., £14.99, March 2012, 978 0 7538 2860 1
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... a more literary and intellectual romance with the Dantesque Beatrice. In scenes of tortuously self-regarding rhetoric, Richard insists on having everything out in the open; Robert is appalled by the fact that communications he thought had been secret were not; Bertha is upset that her duplicity has been revealed to Robert at her expense. Eventually all ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... best remember, when she portrayed the painter Gwen John in a biopic. This included one of John’s self-portraits in which she painted herself nude. Not unlike Gwen John in looks and figure, Anna did it nude herself though she would have been well into her fifties at the time. It was superb and also courageous, actors who are so often mocked for their ...

The Village Life

James Meek: Pushkin in English, 6 June 2019

Novels, Tales, Journeys 
by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Penguin, 512 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 29037 8
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... in Eugene Onegin, is that Pushkin’s attitudes towards the country were as conflicted as the twin self the novel in verse projects. When he stayed at Mikhailovskoye after graduating from his elite Petersburg lycée he was both delighted and impatient. ‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on,’ he wrote. ‘But ...

The Cardoso Legacy

Perry Anderson: Lula’s Inheritance, 12 December 2002

... than it does about democracy. Empires tend to give peoples who have enjoyed them a markedly self-absorbed, provincial outlook: a fate Brazilians have no more been able to escape than Britons or Americans. For the fact – obvious enough in any comparative perspective – is that the local preservation of democracy is no particular merit of ...

Revolution in Poland

Michael Szkolny, 5 March 1981

... the conceptual confusion and intellectual timidity of most of it. There is a strong impression of self-censorship: the most fundamental questions about the future organisation of society are taboo, as if to evoke the possibility of change were to preclude it. An important factor here is the traditional antagonism between Marxism and Catholicism which I shall ...

Diary

Daniella Shreir: What happens at Cannes, 10 July 2025

... get a licence to film in public places or screen his films publicly. The festival can be jarringly self-congratulatory, but it also has real power: the decision to include a particular film makes a dissident director into a celebrity, which gives them a level of protection in their home country. Despite everything, it was a subdued Cannes. On the second ...

Something Is Surviving

Jenny Turner: Olga Tokarczuk’s Mycophilia, 26 June 2025

The Empusium 
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Fitzcarraldo, 326 pp., £14.99, September 2024, 978 1 80427 108 7
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... a story,’ Tokarczuk wonders, ‘that would go beyond the uncommunicative prison of one’s own self?’ Yes there can, she thinks, and it will be told by ‘a new kind of narrator – a “fourth-person” one … a mysterious, tender narrator … a point of view, a perspective from where everything can be seen’. ‘Seeing everything,’ she ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... these relationships,’ Skidelsky suggests, ‘may be found a clue to Mosley’s supreme self-esteem.’ He didn’t do well at school or at Sandhurst; nor did he distinguish himself during the war. Although he did the élite thing in volunteering for the Royal Flying Corps, he won no medals – a matter of some regret for a man who passionately ...

The Crisis in Economic Theory

Jon Elster, 20 October 1983

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change 
by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter.
Harvard, 437 pp., £20, October 1982, 0 674 27227 7
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A General Theory of Exploitation and Class 
by John Roemer.
Harvard, 298 pp., £22, September 1982, 0 674 34440 5
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... capitalist as long as he does not also give away his fortune and inheritance rights. Nor does the self-proletarianised student turn into a worker by virtue of the fact that he or she could do better by becoming, say, a self-employed doctor or lawyer. This feature of the definition makes good sociological sense. We want the ...

Dark and Deep

Helen Vendler, 4 July 1996

Robert Frost: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Constable, 424 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 09 476130 2
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Collected Poems, Prose and Plays 
by Robert Frost, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson.
Library of America, 1036 pp., $35, October 1995, 9781883011062
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... biographer would have weighed such dubious memorial evidence against Frost’s (possibly self-serving) account that he had left college because he was bored; and a scrupulous biographer would have recognised, in support of Frost’s version, that he also left Harvard (in good standing) without finishing. But scrupulousness is not Meyers’s long ...

The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, a voluntary body forming part of the City of London’s means of self-regulation. The power to review the exercise of the Royal Prerogative was established as early as 1967, when the Crown challenged the right of the High Court to entertain a dispute about whether the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board had acted in ...

‘We’ve messed up, boys’

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Bad Blood, 16 November 2023

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.
Viking, 396 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 0 241 62750 1
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Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.
Headline, 390 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 1 0354 0524 4
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... health, David Owen, had told the House of Commons that he was funding an effort to make Britain self-sufficient in blood products by 1977. But he was given a new brief in 1976. The Labour government dropped the commitment to self-sufficiency soon after, apparently for financial reasons. Much of the relevant ...

Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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... both a necromancer communicating with the dead and a pilgrim ‘walking down the landscape of the self’, as he described it. ‘It is in many ways a remaking of the self in which all of the parts have been realigned, redistributed and reassembled into a new being of sense and harmony.’Wilson, whose given name was ...

Great Power Politics

Adam Tooze: What was Bidenomics?, 7 November 2024

... at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... again. The West, in its containment of Russia, has guaranteed not only the independence but the self-defined territorial integrity of Russia’s western neighbours. This could well mean supporting their revenge and reconquest in places lost to them thirty years ago – sometimes with good reason. Ilya BudraitskisThousands​  of people have taken to the ...