‘Don’t scum me out!’

Scott Hames: Alan Warner, 28 April 2011

The Stars in the Bright Sky 
by Alan Warner.
Vintage, 394 pp., £7.99, May 2011, 978 0 09 946182 1
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“... Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here are the girls on the look-out for a good picnic spot: they began to excitedly descend the slight brae towards the castle but then veered over to their right. As their vantage widened across the slope, they ...”

Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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“... in the first five years of life which makes it impossible for the person to kill or steal.’ This may be a tall order to place on teachers, Whipple continued, but too bad: anyone who wanted to keep up with the latest scientific thinking must embrace ‘nurture’ and ‘kiss Nature goodbye’. For the next half-century, American psychologists ...”

How awful

Emily Witt: Claire Messud’s Spinster, 23 May 2013

The Woman Upstairs 
by Claire Messud.
Virago, 304 pp., £14.99, May 2013, 978 1 84408 731 0
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“... right?’ Nora demurs: ‘Not one bit.’ The three adults have dinners together. Nora decides she may be in love with women and nearly confesses her love for Sirena before her lesbian friends talk her down. She dreams of the possibility of moving in with the Shahids and establishing a sort of gynocracy, perhaps in Vermont or Tuscany. Nora’s manic feeling ...”

The Five Techniques

Sadakat Kadri: Who killed Baha Mousa?, 9 May 2013

A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa 
by A.T. Williams.
Cape, 298 pp., £16.99, October 2012, 978 0 224 09688 1
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“... Boy. The armed forces, for their part, have consistently refused to estimate how many people they may have unjustly killed, injured or mistreated during their six-year occupation of Iraq. An unproved war crime is just an allegation to the people it doesn’t touch, and the conventional way of testing serious allegations is to hold a trial. A.T. Williams’s A ...”

Against Hellenocentrism

Peter Green: Persia v. the West, 8 August 2013

Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire, 525-332 BC 
by Stephen Ruzicka.
Oxford, 311 pp., £45, April 2012, 978 0 19 976662 8
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King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE 
by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.
Edinburgh, 258 pp., £24.99, January 2013, 978 0 7486 4125 3
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“... does the later Sicilian Expedition, a similarly remote and costly venture – that such campaigns may have been motivated by a more pressing and practical need. The history of Persian relations with Egypt and the West from Cyrus to Alexander reveals certain fundamental weaknesses in the Achaemenid military machine: slowness in mobilisation, inadequately ...”

Tremendous in His Wrath

Eric Foner: George Washington, Slave Owner, 19 December 2019

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon 
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January 2019, 978 0 8139 4184 4
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“... or sold at the Alexandria market. Oddly, Thompson suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers … a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological ...”

Too Important to Kill

Adam Shatz: Real Men Go to Tehran, 23 January 2020

“... the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s clerical leadership may have dreamed of an Iranian sphere of in­fluence – a Shia crescent – but it was Soleimani who built it, patiently and ruthlessly, after becoming head of the Quds Force in 1998. He spent most of his time on the road, ensuring that Iran’s interests were ...”

Stir and Bustle

David Trotter: Corridors, 19 December 2019

Corridors: Passages of Modernity 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 78914 053 8
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“... line of communication’ (stärkster Verbindung) with the castle. The wrong destination may, after all, be the right one; and in another sense, too, since K. falls asleep and dreams that he is wrestling with a naked castle official who resembles a Greek god. It’s all to no avail. The next morning, Bürgel can’t wait to get rid of him, and he is ...”

Muffled Barks, Muted Yelps

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Hurricane Season’, 19 March 2020

Hurricane Season 
by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes.
Fitzcarraldo, 232 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 913097 09 7
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“... his job description.There’s just enough religious education to convince young people that they may be damned, or worse than damned, plunged into ‘a darkness devoid of even the solace of the incandescent fires of hell’. The Church frowns on masturbation, but the code of Mexican machismo is more permissive, even allowing for deviations from ...”

Beastliness

John Mullan: Eric Griffiths, 23 May 2019

If Not Critical 
by Eric Griffiths, edited by Freya Johnston.
Oxford, 248 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 880529 8
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The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry 
by Eric Griffiths.
Oxford, 351 pp., £55, July 2018, 978 0 19 882701 6
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“... much of a reader’s uncertainty about how to speak it. The ambiguity in the intonation of a text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative ways of voicing the written words, and are led to reflect on the interplay of those possible voicings. Griffiths was hardly the first critic to admire poetry that ‘envisages and ...”

Bare Bones

Steven Shapin: Rhinoceros v. Megatherium, 8 March 2018

The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History 
by Juan Pimentel, translated by Peter Mason.
Harvard, 356 pp., £21.95, January 2017, 978 0 674 73712 9
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“... Pimentel says, ‘a blessed animal’. The earlier Greek geographer Strabo (c.63 BCE-c.24 CE), who may have seen a rhino in Egypt, offered a physical description: it had a single horn (‘rhinoceros’ from the Greek ῥῑνόκερως: nose + horn); it was smaller than an elephant; it bore some resemblance to a wild boar; and it had a welted hide very like ...”

Anything Can Be Rescinded

Isabel Hull: When can you start a war?, 26 April 2018

The Internationalists and Their Plan to Outlaw War 
by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro.
Allen Lane, 608 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 0 241 20070 4
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“... a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations’. As of 17 July this year the ICC may begin to hear cases alleging that crime. Other methods were also employed in the hope of reducing armed conflict. Arbitration as an alternative to war was used increasingly over the 19th century as states concluded bilateral treaties obliging them to submit ...”

Scary Dad

J. Robert Lennon, 10 May 2018

My Absolute Darling 
by Gabriel Tallent.
Fourth Estate, 432 pp., £12.99, August 2017, 978 0 00 818521 3
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Elmet 
by Fiona Mozley.
John Murray, 311 pp., £8.99, March 2018, 978 1 4736 7649 7
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“... passages that occasionally interrupt the book, that Daniel will eventually realise he is gay, and may be transgender. ‘You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man,’ he says midway through the novel. ‘I did not know then that it was girls not boys who grew their hair and their nails long.’ I suspect that Elmet would like to be ...”

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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“... step with English opinion; the substantive issues were matters of relative indifference. Theresa May’s political ally, Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, maintained a consistently negative policy towards European integration between the two referendums, though there were noticeable changes in tone and register. In 1975 the DUP’s co-founder ...”

You have a new memory

Hal Foster: Trevor Paglen, 11 October 2018

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen 
by John P. Jacob and Luke Skrebowski.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 252 pp., £45, July 2018, 978 1 911282 33 4
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Trevor Paglen 
by Lauren Cornell, Julia This Bryan-Wilson and Omar Kholeif.
Phaidon, 160 pp., £29.95, May 2018, 978 0 7148 7344 2
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“... The standard critique that contemporary society is swamped by spectacle, by images directed at us, may also have to be revised. If power today depends largely on data – on invisible information harvested, searched, surveilled and acted on by corporations, governments, insurance companies, credit agencies and police departments – how are we to track it, let ...”