Going Electric

Patrick McGuinness: J.H. Prynne, 7 September 2000

Poems 
by J.H. Prynne.
Bloodaxe/Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre, 440 pp., £25, March 2000, 1 85224 491 7
Show More
Pearls that Were 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 28 pp., £4, March 1999, 1 900968 95 9
Show More
Triodes 
by J.H. Prynne.
Barque, 42 pp., £4, December 1999, 9781903488010
Show More
Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 
edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain.
Wesleyan, 280 pp., $45, March 1999, 0 8195 2241 4
Show More
Show More
... are still in evidence:        Causing the charm, the pause never so alertly        held abeyantly to flood entire        its moderate premium diving like a crashed star in salt water, outbroken fire. In Prynne’s poems we find metamorphoses, spectacular and menacing natural phenomena, manmade disasters and cosmic ructions tapering down ...

Das Nuffa Dat and BigGloria3

Elaine Showalter: Up and Down the Academic Ladder, 1 November 2001

Academic Instincts 
by Marjorie Garber.
Princeton, 187 pp., £11.95, February 2001, 9780691049700
Show More
Postmodern Pooh 
by Frederick Crews.
North Point, 175 pp., $22, October 2001, 0 86547 626 8
Show More
Show More
... Fish. Fish’s salaries and lecture fees have been part of the lore of academic culture since David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), where he appeared thinly disguised as Morris Zapp, who, ‘enviably offered his first job by Euphoria State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it’; and who had ‘the professional killer instinct’ in a ...

Because It’s Ugly

Jonathan Rosen: Double-Crested Cormorants, 9 October 2014

The Double-Crested Cormorant: Plight of a Feathered Pariah 
by Linda Wires.
Yale, 349 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 300 18711 3
Show More
Show More
... species’. But Wires believes that the bird’s ‘athleticism and effectiveness’ are being held against it, for while it is extremely successful at catching fish, its rate of consumption relative to body mass is no higher than that of many other species, and lower than some. Cormorants are opportunistic feeders, and often catch ‘trash fish’, not ...

Dear Prudence

Martin Daunton: The pension crisis, 19 February 2004

Banking on Death or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions 
by Robin Blackburn.
Verso, 550 pp., £15, July 2002, 9781859844090
Show More
Show More
... to support as many family members as possible, at the expense of productivity. Early modern states held that the elderly were the responsibility of their relations. In England, the Poor Law of 1601 stated that ‘the father and grandfather, mother and grandmother and children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other poor person not able to ...

Putting on Some English

Terence Hawkes: Eagleton’s Rise, 7 February 2002

The Gatekeeper: A Memoir 
by Terry Eagleton.
Allen Lane, 178 pp., £9.99, January 2002, 0 7139 9590 4
Show More
Show More
... great deal about access to holy places. As a ten-year-old altar boy in a Carmelite convent, he had held the position of ‘gatekeeper’, so that whenever a novice took the veil and vanished behind the walls for good, it was the hand of a future Marxist literary theorist which opened, then fatefully closed, the portals. As the title of his memoir ...

Clever, or even Clever-Clever

Adam Kuper: Edmund Leach, 23 May 2002

Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life 
by Stanley Tambiah.
Cambridge, 517 pp., £60, February 2002, 0 521 52102 5
Show More
The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. I: Anthropology and Society 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 406 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08124 3
Show More
The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. II: Culture and Human Nature 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 420 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08508 7
Show More
Show More
... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...

Diary

Fintan O’Toole: The Case of Darren Graham, 6 September 2007

... officials; an offer from the president of the GAA to have Darren Graham as his guest at a big game held at the association’s imposing main stadium in Dublin; an eventual apology from the Fermanagh GAA, leading to Graham’s decision to return to the game. Somewhere behind the coverage, though, there was a sense of something not being said. Colm Bradley, a ...

He K-norcked Her One

August Kleinzahler: Burroughs and Kerouac’s Novel, 28 May 2009

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks 
by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Penguin, 214 pp., £20, November 2008, 978 1 84614 164 5
Show More
Show More
... and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to it, written in 1945 by Kerouac and ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: Michael Wolff’s Book Party, 8 February 2018

... Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were said to be indicative of deeper flaws in Michael Wolff the man: was ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...

We Are Many

Tom Crewe: In the Corbyn Camp, 11 August 2016

... of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale Coleman, who was often described as the most effective member of his team, has now been announced as a top adviser to his opponent in the leadership ...

Paths to Restitution

Jeremy Harding: Leopold’s Legacy, 5 June 2025

... Near the end of his life, dogged by criticism of the Free State, Leopold destroyed many papers held at the International African Association, a propaganda organisation created in Brussels in the 1870s to press his claims in central Africa. But there is still a mass of documents to re-examine at the museum – on at least three kilometres of shelving – in ...

Good History

Christopher Hill, 5 March 1981

After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter 
edited by Barbara Malament.
Manchester, 363 pp., £17.95, December 1980, 0 7190 0805 0
Show More
Puritans and Adventurers 
by T.H. Breen.
Oxford, 270 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 19 502728 0
Show More
On History 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sarah Matthews.
Weidenfeld, 226 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 297 77880 3
Show More
Sociology and History 
by Peter Burke.
Allen and Unwin, 116 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 19 502728 0
Show More
Show More
... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...

No Ordinary Law

Stephen Sedley: Constitution-Makers, 5 June 2008

... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...

Diary

Helen Sullivan: Trapped in the Mine, 6 March 2025

... danger. It was then that we suspected the police were involved.’ The men were afraid. They held meetings, trying to work out what to do. They still had supplies of toothpaste, vinegar and salt, and mixed these with the water that dripped from the rocks.For weeks, they had no contact with the surface world. Then, in early November, pamphlets headed ...