Issues for His Prose Style

Andrew O’Hagan: Hemingway, 7 June 2012

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22 
edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert Trogdon.
Cambridge, 431 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 521 89733 4
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... to match the monumental character of the prose. Fruscione compares Hemingway’s biographer Michael Reynolds’s story of Ernie returning in 1919 to his high school in Oak Park to show off his blood-stained uniform to the children, with a ‘similar act of masculine self-aggrandisement’ on Faulkner’s part. This was steep, even by Hemingway standards ...

Every Penny a Vote

Alexander Zevin: Neoliberalism, 15 August 2019

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism 
by Quinn Slobodian.
Harvard, 381 pp., £25.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97952 9
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... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...

Rise and Fall of Radio Features

Marilyn Butler, 7 August 1980

Louis MacNeice in the BBC 
by Barbara Coulton.
Faber, 215 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 571 11537 3
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Best Radio Plays of 1979 
Eyre Methuen/BBC, 192 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 413 47130 6Show More
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... in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the ...

That Shape Am I

Patricia Lockwood: Among the Mystics, 23 January 2025

On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy 
by Simon Critchley.
Profile, 325 pp., £18.99, October 2024, 978 1 80081 693 0
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... sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn ...

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence 
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3
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... its feckless dependents. The strategy was astoundingly successful in winning over public opinion. George Osborne, the chancellor, evoked a shift worker ‘leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. In an interview with the Sun, Duncan Smith more ...
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky 
by Patrick Hamilton.
Hogarth, 528 pp., £4.95, June 1987, 0 7012 0751 5
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Trust Me 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 249 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 394 55833 2
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Her Story: A Novel 
by Dan Jacobson.
Deutsch, 142 pp., £8.95, August 1987, 0 233 98116 0
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... it. He died in 1962. In his admirably perceptive introduction to the now reprinted masterpiece, Michael Holroyd comments on Hamilton’s Scottish provenance, something that had never occurred to me when I first took to him. His father had been an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a ...

The Cruiser

Christopher Hitchens, 22 February 1996

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Free Press, 168 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 02 874094 7
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... and the counter-revolution exist not only in the world at large but also within himself. As George Orwell really did say in another context, it would almost be worth being dead to have something like that written about you. And in The Great Melody, O’Brien expanded upon some of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have ...

Only in the Balkans

Misha Glenny: The Balkans Imagined, 29 April 1999

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination 
by Vesna Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, May 1998, 0 300 07312 7
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Imagining the Balkans 
by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35, June 1997, 9780195087505
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... Albanians are predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe? In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the ...

Are we there yet?

David Simpson: Abasing language, abusing prisoners, 17 February 2005

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror 
by Mark Danner.
Granta, 573 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 9781862077720
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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib 
edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
Cambridge, 1284 pp., £27.50, February 2005, 0 521 85324 9
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... pre-emptively by claiming that the European Convention on Human Rights does not apply in Iraq. George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was quoted in May 2004 as distinguishing between the ‘barbaric’ televised executions of Westerners and the merely ‘shameful’ abuses of Iraqis by Westerners. This effort to tabulate degrees of cruelty (in ...

Bumming and Booing

John Mullan: William Wordsworth, 5 April 2001

Wordsworth: A Life 
by Juliet Barker.
Viking, 971 pp., £25, October 2000, 9780670872138
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The Hidden Wordsworth 
by Kenneth Johnston.
Pimlico, 690 pp., £15, September 2000, 0 7126 6752 0
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Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s 
by David Bromwich.
Chicago, 186 pp., £9.50, April 2000, 0 226 07556 7
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... scholarly assessment’. It was about a year and a half before the speculation was scotched. Michael Durey, writing in the TLS, proved that ‘Mr Wordsworth’ was in fact the poet’s cousin Robinson Wordsworth, collector of customs at Harwich, who was being paid for expenses incurred in arresting and taking to London two men accused of treason. He also ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
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Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
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The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
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Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
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... the region probably contained huge oil reserves and that the Royal Navy would require oil, Lloyd George told his French opposite number, Clemenceau, that he wanted Mosul; Clemenceau provisionally agreed. The deal finally went through in 1926 and Syria lost this territory too, as well as the prospect of significant oil wealth; Mosul and its population became ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... to Synge to Christian neo-medievalism and the study of ancient Greece. The English scholar George Thomson reading Aeschylus on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...