Learning My Lesson

Marina Warner, 19 March 2015

“... students was told by management to take down the questions she raised on Facebook). Gagging orders may not even be necessary. Silence issues from different causes: from fear, insecurity, precarious social conditions and shame. It is the shame of the battered wife that allows her husband to count on her silence. I recognise, for example, the compunction in the ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More
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“... the Declaration was plainly contradictory, with its promise that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ This had been carefully worded. ‘Civil and religious rights’ weren’t the same as ...”

Inside Every Foreigner

Jackson Lears: America Intervenes, 21 February 2019

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life 
by Robert M. Dallek..
Allen Lane, 692 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 241 31584 2Show More
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“... and falling into water so cold it left him numb for hours. The overall effect, Dallek suggests, may have been to compromise his immune system, rendering him more susceptible to the polio virus. Polio rarely had serious consequences for adults, but it devastated FDR. Eleanor, who had discovered Franklin’s affair with her social secretary Lucy ...”

White Power

Thomas Meaney, 1 August 2019

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America 
by Kathleen Belew.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8Show More
Revolutionaries for the Right Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War 
by Kyle Burke.
North Carolina, 337 pp., June 2018, 978 1 4696 4073 0Show More
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“... displaying Rhodesian military regalia. For the wider American conservative movement, white power may have been a useful dog off the leash when it came to unofficially fighting far-flung communist insurgencies, but it has also been a liability. Faced with the reality of a multiracial America, the mainstream Republican Party has mostly been wary of making ...”

‘This is not a biography’

Jacqueline Rose: Sylvia Plath, 22 August 2002

“... story shut down around her, clamping her writing into its hollow wooden frame. Death and marriage may have fed and fuelled her writing, but – posthumously at least – they cramp her style.According to Freud, the act of suicide always involves more than one person. Maybe that is one reason why suicide is classified as a crime. Maybe, too, that is why ...”

Bobbery

James Wood: Pushkin’s Leave-Taking, 20 February 2003

Pushkin: A Biography 
by T.J. Binyon.
HarperCollins, 731 pp., £30, September 2002, 0 00 215084 0Show More
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“... a notebook propped on his knees. More important, he began Eugene Onegin. He started the poem in May 1823, and wrote it intermittently until September 1830. It was begun in relative juvenility and finished just as the poet was marrying. As late as 1835, Pushkin considered adding to it; years earlier he had apparently planned a chapter in which Onegin ...”

Bored with Sex?

Adam Phillips: Nasty Turns, 6 March 2003

“... is the listener when we are talking to ourselves? Again it is paternity that is at issue. Tietjens may not be the father of his son, but is he the father of his own thoughts? Something that belongs to you, something as intimate as your own thoughts, could be illegitimate: could come from someone or somewhere else. A lot turns on these nasty turns. Freud ...”

Refeudalising Europe

Alain Supiot: The Perils of Thinking in English, 21 July 2005

“... and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective.’ One searches the new treaty in vain for a provision that would oblige economic and monetary policy to be indexed to an improvement in people’s living and working ...”

‘Going Native’

Dan Jacobson: Sexual favours in colonial East Africa, 25 November 1999

“... of the Government. We are inclined to think that jealousy of Mr Silberrad’s authority may have had something to do with their intervention in the matter. Still, the Governor was stuck with Routledge and the information that he had been given. At their meeting he had learned that one of Silberrad’s women had formerly ‘belonged’ to an African ...”

Barbecue of the Vanities

Steven Shapin: Big Food, 22 August 2002

Eating Right in the Renaissance 
by Ken Albala.
California, 315 pp., £27.95, February 2002, 0 520 22947 9Show More
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health 
by Marion Nestle.
California, 457 pp., £19.95, February 2002, 0 520 22465 5Show More
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“... these labels are meant to be ‘helpful for people who are concerned about eating foods that may help keep them healthier longer’. I’m all for that. The label on the tin of cannellini beans tells me that there’s no fat (saturated or unsaturated) in it and no cholesterol. That’s nice, I think. Like everyone else, I’ve heard that eating a lot of ...”

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity 
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5Show More
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“... AT 8 p.m.​ on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took three seconds for the image to appear clearly, but it felt like an eternity. First, a bald head (which, at this stage, could have been mistaken for that of the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also bald), then the eyes and the mouth and, finally, the full portrait ...”

She shall be nameless

Nicholas Spice: Marlen Haushofer, 18 December 2014

The Wall 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Quartet, 211 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7311 2Show More
Nowhere Ending Sky 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 178 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7207 8Show More
The Loft 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 173 pp., £12, May 2011, 978 0 7043 7313 6Show More
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“... the ‘always already’ of death, the ineluctable truth that, as Larkin puts it, ‘most things may never happen: this one will.’ The woman ends her account with a valiant gesture towards an implausible future, but the hour is indisputably late – she has only so many matches left. The Wall is a study in dread; The Loft is lighter in mood and tone, more ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... campaign still in the ascendancy as the day of reckoning looms, the pro-independence camp may yet come to regret its rejection of gradualism. Tom Devine The​ Scottish government states that it is committed ‘to securing the earliest safe withdrawal of Trident from an independent Scotland. This includes the removal of all elements of the current ...”

All This Love Business

Jean McNicol: Vanessa and Julian Bell, 24 January 2013

Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Stanford, 314 pp., £38.95, 0 8047 7413 7Show More
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“... happened to turn up in Cambridge. They usually tried to be reassuring. Keynes wrote to Vanessa in May 1929 that ‘Lytton thinks that the young lack blood and it would be better if they cared more about politics and less about aesthetics; however we all agree that Julian is miles the best of the younger generation.’Strachey might well have come to this ...”

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

“... in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional) and ended – abruptly – in November, when Proposition 8, a rogue right-wing initiative intended to outlaw gay marriage in California ...”
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