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Thinking the unthinkable

John Naughton, 4 September 1980

... last major speech, delivered to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on 11 May 1979. The complete text has been reprinted by CND under the heading ‘The Speech We Ignored’. The question is: who is ‘we’? Not the disarmament lobby, surely, for Mountbatten was only articulating what its members have been saying for generations ...

Jane Austen’s Word Process

Marilyn Butler, 25 June 1987

Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method 
by J.F Burrows.
Oxford, 245 pp., £25, February 1987, 0 19 812856 8
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... her Art in 1939. The fact that Burrows writes like Austen herself is splendid. But other people may write well, and not get the much smaller sums they ask for, so it’s worth considering why those who put our money into this project seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more ...

Fatalism, Extenuation and Despair

Peter Clarke: John Major, 5 March 1998

Major: A Political Life 
by Anthony Seldon.
Weidenfeld, 856 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 297 81607 1
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... It may seem surprising that, within nine months of a famous election triumph, a government can look in such bad shape – its sense of purpose challenged by events and its supporter’ loyalty tested by unpalatable policy commitments. A particularly bitter personal twist is added when a prime minister, so recently hailed as the architect of victory, encounters increasingly open disparagement within his own party – not least from MPs owing their Westminster seats to his popular appeal ...

Why the Tortoise Lost

John Sturrock, 18 September 1997

Bergson: Biographie 
by Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms.
Flammarion, 386 pp., frs 140, April 1997, 9782080666697
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... in mountain air that does wonders for the lungs in these reptilian philosophical times. Bergson may not have had a ‘general principle’ qualifying him to perform as a public oracle, but he had one as a metaphysician, He is the one philosopher this century to have earned an -ism: Bergsonism is a headword to this day in our dictionaries. That it is so is a ...

Might-have-beens must die

Peter Howarth: Christina Rossetti’s Games, 1 July 2021

New Selected Poems 
by Christina Rossetti, edited by Rachel Mann.
Carcanet, 240 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 78410 906 6
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... lingering from that implied stress on the ‘I’ before ‘all-forgotten’. The spirit may now be passing away from love, leaving the friendly room for the last time, or, as the syntax suggests, she may have passed away from love in the first place. In any event, being dead means learning to live with your own ...

Nigels against the World

Ferdinand Mount: The EU Referendum, 19 May 2016

... has already taken seven years to negotiate and isn’t yet complete, and even this arrangement may prove too burdensome and restrictive for the more red-blooded Brexiters. Obama suggested that a similar sort of treaty with the US might take ten years to negotiate. Matt Ridley, a vice-president of Vote Leave and author of The Rational Optimist, argued in ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... from the southern coast of Ireland. For centuries sea captains have used it as a landmark. On 7 May 1915 a local family named Henderson, picnicking on the promontory in bright sunshine, were admiring a huge passenger liner with four raked-back funnels steaming eastward close to shore. Suddenly a vast plume of water and smoke towered above her decks. Within ...

At The Thirteenth Hour

William Wootten: David Jones, 25 September 2003

Wedding Poems 
by David Jones, edited by Thomas Dilworth.
Enitharmon, 88 pp., £12, April 2002, 1 900564 87 4
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David Jones: Writer and Artist 
by Keith Alldritt.
Constable, 208 pp., £18.99, April 2003, 1 84119 379 8
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... of the poem’s copious notes) will know, they are ‘The five unmistakable marks/By which you may know, wherever you go,/The warranted genuine snarks’. The inappropriate source has been made appropriate, in a balance that is sustained throughout the book: intimate humane detail against myth, history and allusion. After art school and the Army, Jones ...

What is concrete?

Michael Wood: Erich Auerbach, 5 March 2015

Time, History and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach 
by Erich Auerbach, edited by James Porter, translated by Jane Newman.
Princeton, 284 pp., £27.95, December 2013, 978 0 691 13711 7
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... useful in reminding us of all Auerbach had done before he came to his best-known book. We may say the same of Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1929), reprinted in 2007 – Said thinks this is ‘in some ways … his most exciting and intense work’. And then there is Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, containing six of Auerbach’s later ...

Saint Shakespeare

Barbara Everett, 19 August 2010

... of the Altars and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, may be written from different ideological positions, yet will imply a similar historical picture. The world they describe is one of political confusion, religious bewilderment and personal danger. Shakespeare’s parents and grandparents lived through three major ...

About Myself

Liam McIlvanney: James Hogg, 18 November 2004

The Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg 
by Karl Miller.
Faber, 401 pp., £25, August 2003, 0 571 21816 4
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Altrive Tales 
by James Hogg, edited by Gillian Hughes.
Edinburgh, 293 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 7486 1893 7
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... wishes to know anything about his life?’) the printer refused to touch it. The reviewer – it may have been Wilson – exhibits Hogg as a liar, fool and plagiarist. About the kindest things in the piece are the aspersions on Hogg’s grammar: ‘Give him a sentence, and force him, at the point of a sword, to point out an accusative, and he is a dead ...
State of Exception 
by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell.
Chicago, 104 pp., £8.50, January 2005, 0 226 00925 4
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... practices. Following Schmitt, Agamben assumes that the rule of law is not like that. While it may be possible to fill in holes in the law through the application of general legal principles, the applicability of law itself is not a matter of jurisprudence. Although the law may make provision for exceptions of various ...

A Frisson in the Auditorium

Blair Worden: Shakespeare without Drama, 20 April 2017

How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays 
by Peter Lake.
Yale, 666 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 0 300 22271 5
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... so hard-worked. We are told repeatedly how Shakespeare’s spectators, or ‘some’ of them, ‘may’ or ‘might’ or ‘may well’ or ‘might well’ have responded to the plays or to scenes in them. The book is unavoidably an exercise not in proof but in grounded speculation (or mostly grounded: Lake does have his ...

Don’t worry about the pronouns

Michael Wood: Iris Murdoch’s First Novel, 3 January 2019

Under the Net 
by Iris Murdoch.
Vintage, 432 pp., £9.99, July 2019, 978 1 78487 518 3
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... us firmly in narrating rather than narrated time. And of course destiny itself, whatever else it may be, is always a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and ...

Blips on the Screen

Andrew Cockburn: Risk-Free Assassinations, 3 December 2020

The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace 
by Michael Boyle.
Oxford, 336 pp., £22.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 063586 2
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Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium 
by Thomas Stubblefield.
California, 218 pp., £70, February 2020, 978 0 520 33961 3
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Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare 
by Joseba Zulaika.
California, 289 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 520 32974 4
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The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare 
by Christian Brose.
Hachette, 288 pp., £21, April 2020, 978 0 316 53353 9
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... drone in 2011.The record of this year’s wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are ...

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