One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
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Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
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‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
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The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
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‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
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‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
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... For three hours cries of anguish were heard like some vast choir singing a death song.’ Joseph Conrad wrote with a ‘certain bitterness’ shortly after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a ...

Oxford University’s Long Haul

Sheldon Rothblatt, 21 January 1988

The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. I: The Early Oxford Schools 
edited by J.I. Catto.
Oxford, 684 pp., £55, June 1984, 0 19 951011 3
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The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. III: The Collegiate University 
edited by James McConia.
Oxford, 775 pp., £60, July 1986, 9780199510139
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The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. V: The 18th Century 
edited by L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell.
Oxford, 949 pp., £75, July 1986, 0 19 951011 3
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Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, 1880-1914 
by Peter Slee.
Manchester, 181 pp., £25, November 1986, 9780719018961
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... teaching and writing of history in English education in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. John Burrow, Reba Softer, Doris Goldstein, Donald Winch, Stefan Collini, Dwight Culler, Deborah Wormell and Rosemary Jann among others have written on one or another dimension. As a secondary but related argument, Slee says that scholars have tended to use the ...

Getting Rich

Pankaj Mishra: In Shanghai, 30 November 2006

... not seem conventionally left-wing and draw on a broad range of thinkers on political economy – John Stuart Mill, Braudel, Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Stiglitz – in their critique of the neo-liberal model of growth. In recent years, Cui’s articles in Dushu, a monthly journal of ideas co-edited by Wang ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed.2‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April, 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. Hobsbawm, whose parents had died ...

The Two Jacobs

James Meek: The Faragist Future, 1 August 2019

... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... through mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment appears ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... Minister for Finance. Plunkett was a wealthy builder who had been made a Papal Count. His son, Joseph, had visited Germany in 1915 to negotiate aid for the Easter Rising, and had been executed for his part in that event. In a by-election in 1917 Count Plunkett had been elected as an abstentionist Sinn Féin MP, and in the election for the Presidency of the ...

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9
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... also produced the first of the notorious Nobel injustices: Charles Best did not get the Prize; John Macleod, who was off fishing in Scotland during the crucial experiments, did.) Or penicillin. Anne Miller, the first patient to be saved by the antibiotic, died on 27 May this year at the age of 90. Her hospital chart from 1942, showing the dramatic break in ...

Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its Venetian blinds, is ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by ...

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey 
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8
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... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...

A Soft Pear

Tom Crewe: Totally Tourgenueff, 21 April 2022

A Nest of Gentlefolk and Other Stories 
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Jessie Coulson.
Riverrun, 568 pp., £9.99, April 2020, 978 1 5294 0405 0
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Love and Youth: Essential Stories 
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater.
Pushkin, 222 pp., £12, October 2020, 978 1 78227 601 2
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... length – in sum, unlike anything in the rest of European literature.’ As early as 1917, Joseph Conrad was complaining of ‘public indifference’ to Turgenev’s works. Eliot, writing in the same year, mourned that Turgenev was the ‘least exploited of Russian novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and ...