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August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
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... professor of physics at the University of Rochester, who had written his PhD on the new field of X-ray technology. He was also fluent in Greek and Latin and a good businessman. After his grandfather’s death Ashbery told an interviewer that Henry Lawrence was the only person he had ever unconditionally loved. Because there was no kindergarten in the ...

On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... and fibre art were displayed on which Sedgwick had scanned computer images of her body, an X-ray and CAT-scan images of her spine. Interviewed by Stephen Barber and David Clark, the editors of Regarding Sedgwick, she said that she was finding it hard to ‘take pleasure in writing’, and was much more drawn to the visual than the verbal, to texture ...

Then came the Hoover

Hugh Pennington: The Allergy Epidemic, 22 June 2006

Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady 
by Mark Jackson.
Reaktion, 288 pp., £25, May 2006, 1 86189 271 3
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... two weeks newspapers had carried the story round the world. Crookes vacuum tubes, Röntgen’s X-ray source, were easy to get; their clinical use began in January 1896. A common claim in hospital histories, particularly those of the celebratory kind, is that the institution being written about was one of the first, if not the first, to use X-rays for ...

Beetle bonkers in the beams

Michael Wood: Tony Harrison, 5 July 2007

Collected Film Poetry 
by Tony Harrison.
Faber, 414 pp., £20, April 2007, 978 0 571 23409 7
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Viking, 452 pp., £154, April 2007, 978 0 670 91591 0
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... to honour the poor and the departed, but we don’t have to be so humble and defeated about it. William Empson pointed out long ago the creepy quietism of the poem’s sentiment: it is ‘stated as pathetic’, he said, ‘but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it.’ Harrison repeatedly borrows the stanza form and rhyme ...

No looking at my elephant

Mary Wellesley: Menageries, 15 December 2016

Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England 1100-1837 
by Caroline Grigson.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 19 871470 5
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... the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting on the dock to greet the ship with his lover, Martha Ray, who ‘manifested an unbounded affection towards the pretty creatures and a violent longing to be made mistress of them’. But even after ‘repeatedly signifying that she wished to have them, [she] went away dissatisfied’, and the animals were taken to ...

Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter, 2 November 1995

The History of Pain 
by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden , and S.W. Cadden.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.50, October 1995, 0 674 39967 6
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... problematic, not to say question-begging. No physician can pop a thermometer into the brain or X-ray the heart. Whatever its nature or function, pain is felt. As Rey observes, it is best conceived of not as a raw physical sensation but as an experience (feeling filtered through culture). Not least, the dubious desire among nonsense medics to distinguish ...

Fishing for Potatoes

James Lasdun: Nissan Rogue, 27 January 2022

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire 
by Hans Greimel and William Sposato.
Harvard, 368 pp., £22, June 2021, 978 1 64782 047 3
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... jet passengers at Osaka’s international airport. The cases were too big for the regular X-ray machines, and the airport staff, no doubt exhausted from a long day processing holiday travellers, waved the men and their cargo through. Out on the tarmac, a ground crew worker noticed that one of the cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that ...
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age 
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Faber, 595 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 571 13177 8
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... the Tory radical, Carlyle, could not make up his mind one way or the other; the radical populist, William Cobbett, was unequivocally opposed, on the grounds that the new law took away the last property rights of its intended beneficiaries; the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Chartists subsumed poverty in more general considerations about the political and ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...

So much for genes

Adrian Woolfson: The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller, 8 March 2001

The Century of the Gene 
by Evelyn Fox Keller.
Harvard, 186 pp., £15.95, October 2000, 0 674 00372 1
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... depends. The jewel in the crown of gene theory, however, came in 1953, when, with the help of X-ray photographs taken by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, Watson and Crick elucidated the three-dimensional structure of DNA. The DNA-based paradigm of heredity with its accompanying ‘genespeak’ was strengthened by experimental studies employing a wide ...

A Particular Way of Looking

J. Hoberman: NeoRealismo, 21 November 2019

NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-60 
edited by Enrica Viganò.
Prestel, 349 pp., £49.99, September 2018, 978 3 7913 5769 0
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... periodicals. It also published work by the left-wing American photographers Paul Strand and William Klein, and ran photographic features intended to inspire subsequent movies, for example Carlo Cisventi’s ‘Chronicles from the Lower Po Valley’ and studies of Bussana Vecchia (a ghost-town near Genoa), Chiara Samugheo’s series of ‘Possessed ...

Year of the Viking

Patrick Wormald, 17 July 1980

The Vikings 
by James Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd.
British Museum, 192 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 7141 1352 2
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The Viking World 
edited by James Graham-Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 220 pp., £11.95, March 1980, 0 906459 04 4
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The Northern World 
edited by David Wilson.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £15, February 1980, 0 500 25070 7
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Vikings! 
by Magnus Magnusson.
Bodley Head, 320 pp., £10, May 1980, 0 370 30272 9
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The Vikings 
by Johannes Bronsted.
Penguin, 347 pp., £1.95, April 1980, 0 14 020459 8
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Viking Age Sculpture 
by Richard Bailey.
Collins, 288 pp., £10.95, February 1980, 0 00 216228 8
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The Viking Age in Denmark 
by Klaus Randsborg.
Duckworth, 206 pp., £7.95, February 1980, 0 7156 1466 5
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... on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed purpose, ‘to examine ...

Damaged Beasts

James Wood: Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’, 8 June 2006

Theft: A Love Story 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 269 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 571 23147 0
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... all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Anglis’s wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel ...

Before and After Said

Maya Jasanoff: A Reappraisal of Orientalism, 8 June 2006

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies 
by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 416 pp., £25, January 2006, 0 7139 9415 0
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... that he had met the Shekinah (a manifestation of divinity) in the form of a Venetian woman whose X-ray vision allowed her to look into the Earth’s core and see Satan. For this he was officially declared insane (but not a heretic) by the Inquisition in Venice. He spent much of his tenure as the Collège de France’s first professor of Arabic comfortably ...

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