Reger said

Michael Hofmann: Thomas Bernhard, 4 November 2010

Old Masters: A Comedy 
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Ewald Osers.
Penguin, 247 pp., £9.99, May 2010, 978 0 14 119271 0
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“... at them and find them foolish; they’re not silly-billies, and he isn’t Rowan Atkinson. It may happen to work – in England – as comedy, or to suggest comedy to us because it’s broad or pitiless or unsubtle, but what if it is just broad and pitiless and unsubtle? Something is being clobbered so hard that we laugh – quite possibly mistakenly, and ...”

When a Corpse Is a Message

Álvaro Enrigue: Mexico’s Cartels, 8 May 2014

Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers 
by Anabel Hernández, translated by Iain Bruce.
Verso, 362 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 1 78168 073 5
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ZeroZeroZero 
by Roberto Saviano.
Feltrinelli, 444 pp., £23, March 2013, 978 88 07 03053 6
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Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey through a Country’s Descent into Darkness 
by Alfredo Corchado.
Penguin, 248 pp., £17, May 2013, 978 1 59420 439 5
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“... A conflict which has left between sixty and a hundred thousand people dead is not untraumatic. It may be – as Calderón’s government insisted – that a high percentage of the dead had knowingly opted for the wild pleasures of the criminal life, but thousands and thousands of others were collateral damage. Besides, even the worst criminals have the right ...”

Apollo’s Ethylene

Peter Green: Delphi, 3 July 2014

Delphi: A History of the Centre of the Ancient World 
by Michael Scott.
Princeton, 422 pp., £19.95, February 2014, 978 0 691 15081 9
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“... and that the establishment of an oracular shrine on the site where it remained for a millennium may well have been directly linked to the presence there of mildly trance-inducing emissions, which would be regarded as a divine gift, proof of Apollo’s presence, and carefully fostered on that basis. There was, as Scott admits, ‘a belief in a connection ...”

Pour a stiff drink

Tessa Hadley: Elizabeth Jane Howard, 6 February 2014

All Change 
by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Mantle, 573 pp., £18.99, November 2013, 978 0 230 74307 6
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“... Perhaps Howard was by now weary of managing her fiction; a lifetime’s effort at the typewriter may have blurred at times into that other effort, keeping house and home, keeping up with life. ‘The recipe said tinned salmon,’ she writes, but Clary ‘only had a tin of sardines. If she put mashed potato with them, and a splash of tomato ketchup and an egg ...”

How bad are we?

Bernard Porter: Genocide in Tasmania, 31 July 2014

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania 
by Tom Lawson.
Tauris, 263 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 1 78076 626 3
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“... but the Times was hardly the representative of the popular press Lawson takes it to be. The same may apply to his evidence for the prominent part he believes Tasmania played in contemporary British culture as the main source of his ‘extermination discourse’: a couple of landscape painters, with tiny natives usually placed – significantly, he thinks ...”

Diary

Will Self: My Typewriters, 5 March 2015

“... on the Olivetti. In retrospect, although the decision to revert to a redundant writing technology may have been prompted by the valetudinarian tower block, there was an underlying and more significant cause: wireless broadband had been installed in our house, and now whenever I was writing I was only a few finger-flicks away from all the pullulating ...”

At the V&A

Marina Warner: Alexander McQueen, 4 June 2015

“... marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke the way a call girl may speak about her sense of being in control; they also fit with an argument about S&M that is gaining ground: that master/slave roles can be empowering for women. I am deeply sceptical about these arguments about sex and pain, but the theme is certainly present ...”

Already a Member

R.W. Johnson: Clement Attlee, 11 September 2014

Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister 
by Michael Jago.
Biteback, 390 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 84954 683 6
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“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

Streets Full of Suitors

Jonah Miller: Early Modern Women, 21 August 2014

City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London 
by Eleanor Hubbard.
Oxford, 297 pp., £24.99, September 2014, 978 0 19 872204 5
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Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London 
by Tim Reinke-Williams.
Palgrave, 225 pp., £60, April 2014, 978 1 137 37209 3
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“... Is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that which is a further matter; utter their minds, chuse Husbands, and censure Complections; and all this in a quiet and friendly sort, betweene themselves and the pinte-pot ...”

Peacock Worship

Gerard Russell: The Yazidis, 11 September 2014

“... some Islamic concepts to the Yazidis even though they never converted them. One such missionary may have been the person Yazidis revere as the founder of their religion, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir. Records suggest that he was an 11th-century Sufi preacher, though Yazidis reject the idea that he was a Muslim: they think of him as an earthly manifestation of one ...”

Remembering Boris Nemtsov

Keith Gessen: Boris Nemtsov, 19 March 2015

“... won’t be a Maidan in Russia.’* Ukraine has lost the war, but what the war has done to Russia may be even worse. For years now there has been speculation about a ‘party of war’, which periodically stages provocations in order to push the president into decisive action. The party of war was said to have manoeuvred Yeltsin into Chechnya and, more ...”

Just Be Grateful

Jamie Martin: Unequal Britain, 23 April 2015

Breadline Britain: The Rise of Mass Poverty 
by Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack.
Oneworld, 334 pp., £9.99, February 2015, 978 1 78074 544 2
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Inequality and the 1 Per Cent 
by Danny Dorling.
Verso, 234 pp., £12.99, September 2014, 978 1 78168 585 3
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“... study by the sociologists Ken-Hou Lin and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, financialisation in the US may have been responsible for more than half the fall in labour’s share of national income between 1970 and 2008. Exorbitant pay levels at the top further widen the gaps: today, nearly 14 per cent of the top 1 per cent in the US work in finance, and take home ...”

Coma-Friendly

Stephen Walsh: Philip Glass, 7 May 2015

Words without Music: A Memoir 
by Philip Glass.
Faber, 416 pp., £22.50, April 2015, 978 0 571 32372 2
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“... minimalist works, and to some extent of Einstein. When you look at what’s being repeated, you may wonder at the tolerance of those who can happily sit for ten or 15 minutes at a stretch listening to the same commonplace two or four-beat figure over and over, without audible variation. Compare the opening of Akhnaten with the introduction to Handel’s ...”

Small Hearts

Terry Eagleton: Anne Enright, 4 June 2015

The Green Road 
by Anne Enright.
Cape, 310 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 0 224 08905 0
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“... Mali to Toronto). Novels are more likely to be about adultery than the invasion of Iraq. Society may stretch no further than the confines of the family, with its sick fantasies and monstrous secrets, its squalid betrayals and mind-wrenching boredom. There is a host of psychically challenged families in classical Irish fiction, from Tristram Shandy and Castle ...”

Sharks’ Teeth

Steven Mithen: How old is the Earth?, 30 July 2015

Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters 
by Martin Rudwick.
Chicago, 360 pp., £21, October 2014, 978 0 226 20393 5
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“... Ussher was simply deploying the best scholarly practice of his time. Today’s earth scientists may use radiometric dating, but they are driven by the same motive as Ussher: the quest for an accurate and detailed chronology. Rudwick emphasises the positive, or at least unobstructive, role of religion since Ussher, correcting the received idea that the 19th ...”