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 ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... his allies viewed his survival as a providential blessing and political imperative. The civil wars may be considered a pivotal moment in British medicine, but victory and survival could still usefully be attributed to God. The​ final part of Battle-Scarred deals with ‘the hidden human costs’ of the civil wars – the psychologically damaged, the ...

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 ...

At the North Gate

Patrick Cockburn: Exorcising Iraq, 11 October 2018

... relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job opportunities and promotion. Costlier spells may be sold to politicians seeking re-election, or to those who ask a sorcerer to exercise magical influence over a government official to force him to sign or refrain from signing a document – not an uncommon need, given that Iraqis spend large amounts of time ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In Disguise of a Merchant

Linda Colley: Company-States, 30 July 2020

Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World 
by Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 691 20351 5
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... to servers in China. Whatever the truth of these accusations, they raise the question of what may be involved when organisations attached to a particular state intervene in an extensive and sustained way in another country and continent, even if their interest appears – and is proclaimed to be – commercially driven. They also raise questions about the ...

China after Covid

Wang Xiuying, 22 October 2020

... the editors thought it would be too far-fetched for Western readers. Radical Chinese nationalists may also be happy to see Trump re-elected. They have nicknamed him ‘the nation-builder’, because he has improved Chinese understanding of American hypocrisy and rallied people round the flag.Claims of double standards, Western hypocrisy and whataboutism are ...

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 ...

Politics First

Jose Harris, 19 April 1984

The Chartists 
by Dorothy Thompson.
Temple Smith, 399 pp., £19.50, February 1984, 0 85117 229 6
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Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832-1982 
by Gareth Stedman Jones.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £22.50, January 1984, 0 521 25648 8
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Class Power and State Power 
by Ralph Miliband.
Verso, 310 pp., £18.50, March 1984, 0 86091 073 3
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... to me probably true that ‘politics’ is the prime category of historical explanation: but it may also be true that certain realities of power are ineluctable, whether politically conscious people actually talk about them or not. Autopsies on the Labour Party seem to be in fashion, perhaps prematurely in view of the fact that the patient is by no means ...

Trickes of the Clergye

Alexandra Walsham: Atheistical Thoughts, 25 April 2024

Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience 
by Michael Hunter.
Cambridge, 223 pp., £30, July 2023, 978 1 009 26877 6
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... divine John Edwards surmised that ‘there is scarcely a Town where there are not some that may justly be reckon’d in this number.’ The widespread anxiety about the rise of irreligion reflected in sermons, pamphlets and tracts is hard to reconcile with the shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart ...

Coiling in Anarchy

Rosemary Hill: Top of the Lighthouse, 16 February 2023

Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse 
by Veronica della Dora.
Reaktion, 280 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 1 78914 549 6
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... a go of Moominpappa’s ambition to be a lighthouse keeper. Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea may well owe something to Poe. In it, the trolls find the lighthouse deserted, the light broken and on a table hundreds of tiny scratches in groups of six, with a seventh drawn through to mark the weeks: ‘Week after week all the same, except one which had only ...

I cannot explain my wife

Joanna Biggs: ‘Biography of X’, 4 May 2023

Biography of X 
by Catherine Lacey.
Granta, 394 pp., £18.99, April, 978 1 78378 927 6
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... X exceptional. Against the book’s impulse to make friends is the idea that political separation may be the only way certain desirable civic conditions can come to pass. Lacey has said that creating a political near-paradise (though even here, the leftists still like in-fighting) seemed to her necessary in order to write freely about same-sex marriage in the ...

Sprigs of Wire

Ange Mlinko: On Jo Ann Beard, 21 March 2024

Collected Works 
by Jo Ann Beard.
Serpent’s Tail, 439 pp., £17.99, August 2023, 978 1 80081 788 3
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Cheri 
by Jo Ann Beard.
Serpent’s Tail, 79 pp., £10, August 2023, 978 1 80081 785 2
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... so much creative licence as a deep identification between the author and her subject. Cheri may remind her of the women she grew up with: working-class women, perhaps without the protection of husbands; women who generally rely on other women. Beard’s essay feels like a bravura attempt to rescue Cheri from the loneliness of her death. The pieces in ...