Bye-bye, NY

Ange Mlinko: Harry Mathews’s Fever Dream, 18 March 2021

Collected Poems: 1946-2016 
by Harry Mathews.
Sand Paper Press, 288 pp., $28, February 2020, 978 0 9843312 8 4
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... and pleading, but in the end she left him and the children. Thus ended their decade of mutual self-discovery, travel and art-making as they flitted from Paris to Deià to Spain to Provence, foraging for chanterelles in Lans-en-Vercors, dining at La Coupole or Le Bar du Dôme with Giacometti and Beckett and Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Harry and ...

Human Origami

Adam Mars-Jones: Four-Dimensional Hinton, 4 March 2021

Hinton 
by Mark Blacklock.
Granta, 290 pp., £8.99, April, 978 1 78378 521 6
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... gender relations, and Blacklock’s ‘Tesseract’ section shows rather delicately the way his self-imposed disgrace created complex ripples among the membership. There was personal sympathy for Hinton and Mary, with a little left over for Maud, there was blame visited on the baleful influence and example of Hinton’s late father, but there was also ...

How to Get Rich

Laleh Khalili: Who owns the oil?, 23 September 2021

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources 
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy.
Random House Business, 410 pp., £20, February, 978 1 84794 265 4
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... that the newly independent states were going to have to fight to be allowed to be economically self-sufficient. ‘Decolonisation,’ Nkrumah wrote,is a word much and unctuously used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political control from colonialist to African sovereignty. The motive spring of colonialism, however, still controls the ...

At Tate Britain

Gaby Wood: Paula Rego, 7 October 2021

... Rego sat at the back of the class and painted from her imagination. ‘Of course one becomes very self-conscious at art school,’ she told her son hesitantly during an interview in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an intellectual, the restricted way of teaching in those days – the Euston Road method, which I could not do. You lose your – it’s not ...

I don’t even get bananas

Madeleine Schwartz: Christina Stead, 2 November 2017

The Man Who Loved Children 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 528 pp., £10, April 2016, 978 1 78497 148 9
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Letty Fox: Her Luck 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 592 pp., £14, May 2017, 978 1 78669 139 2
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... which she asked White to put in his rubbish bin’ and then spent the meal bragging about her self-sufficiency.Born in 1902 in a suburb of Sydney, she grew up in a home similar to the one she would describe in The Man Who Loved Children. Her mother died when she was very young and she lived in the chaotic, messy household of her father and his second ...

National Trolls

Yuan Huang: Censorship in China, 5 October 2017

... Leaked internal emails from Sony Pictures in 2014 showed in detail how Hollywood studios exercise self-censorship, trying to guess what Chinese censors might not like and altering or cutting scenes. An attack by aliens on the Great Wall in the original version of Pixels (2015) was carefully excised, in order not to upset the censor. In recent years, more ...

The crime was the disease

Mike Jay: ‘Mad-Doctors in the Dock’, 15 June 2017

Mad-Doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis, 1760-1913 
by Joel Peter Eigen.
Johns Hopkins, 206 pp., £29.50, September 2016, 978 1 4214 2048 6
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... also called distinguished medical witnesses who testified that his condition had robbed him of all self-control, amounting to an impulse ‘so strong that nothing short of a physical impossibility would prevent him from performing an act which his delusion might compel him to do’. The jury found McNaughton not guilty on grounds of insanity, and he was ...

Our National Hodgepodge

Colin Kidd and Malcolm Petrie, 29 June 2017

... a united island. If this is the outcome of Brexit for Northern Ireland, it will be a curious, self-inflicted defeat for the unionist community. Among the province’s political parties, only the DUP supported the Leave campaign. The Tories’ new ‘friends and allies’ gained influence after the Good Friday Agreement, which split the Ulster Unionist ...

King shall hold kingdom

Tom Shippey: Æthelred the Unready, 30 March 2017

Æthelred: The Unready 
by Levi Roach.
Yale, 369 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 300 19629 0
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... patriotic loyalty runs out. By 1066 the long-suffering English population had had eighty years of self-interested squabbling among their ruling classes. It wasn’t just Æthelred’s mother who must have ‘look[ed] on with dismay’ at this. One might say of Hastings, as the chronicler said of Ulfcytel’s battle in 1004: ‘If [the home team] had been up ...

Strawberries in December

Paul Laity: She Radicals, 30 March 2017

Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso, 512 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 1 78478 588 8
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... for her ‘quick-coming millennium’, warning that the ‘cold truth’ might eventually dawn on self-sacrificing idealists that ‘the people thank them not.’ Daniell responded with fervour, but Baillie, another of Rowbotham’s rebellious six, was undaunted, filling Liberty with his thoughts on Proudhon and Kropotkin. ‘They had all turned their backs ...

Diary

Colm Tóibín: Alone in Venice, 19 November 2020

... to him that he should put on his mask. Ruefully, he did so. While I felt the glow that only self-satisfaction can bring, he will hate me for the rest of his days. During my time wandering from church to church, a friend gave me a book called From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums 1798-1898, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne ...

A Platter of Turnips

Esther Chadwick: Rembrandt’s Neighbours, 7 January 2021

Black in Rembrandt’s Time 
edited by Elmer Kolfin and Epco Runia.
WBooks, 135 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 94 6258 372 6
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... of presence, of embodiment and of referentiality, on the stand. In their numerous portraits and self-portraits in costume and with their character heads derived from now unnamed models (black and white), Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including his pupils Dou and Flinck, consciously and playfully explored the boundaries and fluid interplay between the ...

The Limits of Caste

Hazel V. Carby, 21 January 2021

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents 
by Isabel Wilkerson.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £20, August 2020, 978 0 241 48651 1
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... her book to help change minds and increase empathy, encouraging ‘the work to educate one’s self and to listen with a humble heart, to understand another’s experience from their perspective’. Yet she tells stories of migration without revealing any empathy for the history of foreign black migrants or for the contemporary migrants from other parts of ...

Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
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... him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal experiences held no shame). Magdalena of the Cross jerks in satanic couplings with a devil called Balban, who is exorcised from her body and exits in the form of a caterpillar ...

Each of us is a snowball

Susannah Clapp: Squares are best, 22 October 2020

Square Haunting 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 422 pp., £20, January 2020, 978 0 571 33065 2
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... servant. The names are a tease. Although a lord, Wimsey is intellectually astringent; Vane isn’t self-regarding, nor does she swivel in every passing wind. It is a lively, sometimes spiky novel, but the ideas are laid out on a plate and Wade is overdoing it when she calls it her ‘greatest’. How many of Sayers’s other fictions are merely ...