Lost in the Forest

Ian Hacking: Who needs the DSM?, 8 August 2013

DSM-5: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition 
by the American Psychiatric Association.
American Psychiatric Publishing, 947 pp., £97, May 2013, 978 0 89042 555 8
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“... Some suggest that there will never be a ‘DSM-6’, on the grounds that the whole endeavour is self-destructing. Don’t count on it. It is on the contrary likely that the manual will become more attuned to neurological causes as these gradually conquer more and more of psychiatry. The DSM is a living, organic creature, kept alive by myriad worker bees. At ...”

More Tales from the Bolshoi

Simon Morrison: Tales from the Bolshoi, 4 July 2013

“... against corruption at the Bolshoi.’ Lunkina herself left the theatre last September, to live in self-imposed exile in Ontario with her husband, the producer Vladislav Moskalev, and their children. Threats connected to Moskalev’s business dealings prompted the move. Moskalev had his own hypothesis about the attack on Filin. In his view, it stemmed from ...”

Beware Kite-Flyers

Stephen Sedley: The British Constitution, 12 September 2013

The British Constitution: A Very Short Introduction 
by Martin Loughlin.
Oxford, 152 pp., £7.99, April 2013, 978 0 19 969769 4
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“... themselves in court, seek to resolve issues by themselves, pay for services which support self-resolution, pay for private representation or decide not to tackle the issue at all’.* This is an argument not for modifying or reducing legal aid but for abolishing it, something the Treasury has wished it could do for half a century, but which the ...”

Forms of Delirium

Peter Pomerantsev: The Night Wolves, 10 October 2013

“... of the usurers. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. That is why you want to bomb Syria, the homeland of ...”

Going Supernova

David Kaiser, 17 February 2011

Cycles of Time 
by Roger Penrose.
Bodley Head, 288 pp., £25, September 2010, 978 0 224 08036 1
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How Old Is the Universe? 
by David Weintraub.
Princeton, 370 pp., £20.95, 0 691 14731 0
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“... Two independent teams used the refurbished Hubble to study supernovae, cataclysmic explosions from self-destructive stars that can temporarily outshine entire galaxies. Their data, first announced in 1998, reversed decades of expectations by suggesting that our universe isn’t just getting bigger; it’s getting bigger faster. To reconcile their robust ...”

Grey Panic

T.J. Clark: Gerhard Richter, 17 November 2011

“... an emotional nowhere – from which Ensslin in all her craziness and vulnerability and courage and self-righteousness could then emerge, to address us, to stand opposite and laugh. The two later Oppositions, I sometimes think, are the only pictures of people done in our time that the future will care to look at – though not for long. They are Géricault’s ...”

‘Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!’

Barbara Newman: Chaucer’s Voices, 21 November 2019

Chaucer: A European Life 
by Marion Turner.
Princeton, 599 pp., £30, April 2019, 978 0 691 16009 2
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“... responds to the Italian’s hyperbolic authority. Turner​ insists that this streak of parody and self-parody stems from more than simple anxiety of influence or difference in artistic temperament. ‘Dante is a poet of truth,’ theological and political, she writes, who stakes his claim to greatness on that truth, whereas Chaucer, like Ovid, ‘suggests ...”

Diary

David Trotter: Bearness, 7 November 2019

“... the pale crescents splashed across their chests crack open. Your heart stops a little at a self-disclosure as effusive as a star shell bursting or a flag shaken out. The loveliness is so casual.Of course, they’re not performing for us. They don’t hold back, as they wrestle and swipe, or gnaw savagely at an exposed bit of neck or shoulder. Yet they ...”

Madder Men

Hal Foster: Richard Hamilton on Richard Hamilton, 24 October 2019

Richard Hamilton: Introspective 
by Phillip Spectre.
König, 408 pp., £49, September 2019, 978 3 88375 695 0
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“... and he left a project concerning the Occupied Territories unfinished at his death. A Polaroid self-portrait (1973) In the end Hamilton was animated by this tension above all: even as he embraced the postwar world of spectacle, he aimed to ‘open up an apparently seamless media image or event to analysis through a variety of print media and painting ...”

To the Bitter End

Adam Tooze: The Nolde above the sofa, 5 December 2019

Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich 
edited by Bernhard Fulda, Aya Soika and Christian Ring.
Prestel, 320 pp., £45, May 2019, 978 3 7913 5894 9
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“... staff was that the conventional story of Nolde’s survival under National Socialism was a self-serving postwar myth. His paintings reflected not only his ‘emotional response to the world about him’, but a profoundly troubling nationalist and antisemitic politics. And the National Gallery in Berlin was planning a blockbuster exhibition to expose ...”

Some people never expect to be expected

Penelope Fitzgerald: Omitted from ‘Innocence’, 19 December 2019

“... Once he had recognised this last feeling, he congratulated himself. But then, the sensation of self-approval was also confusing.‘It’s a bit difficult here when you have a passenger to see the traffic coming in from the right.’‘It’s impossible,’ said Chiara but drove on giving no quarter.He sat there, hunched and disconcerted, surreptitiously ...”

Kinks and Convolutions

James Lasdun: GOD HATES YOUR FEELINGS, 20 February 2020

Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope, Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church 
by Megan Phelps-Roper.
Riverrun, 289 pp., £14.99, October 2019, 978 1 78747 800 8
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“... interested in the way Megan’s mind worked. Their exchanges, in which CG gently probes at the self-serving illogic of Westboro theology while Megan observes herself growing steadily more susceptible to his flattering curiosity, take on the quality of a courtship in a very old-fashioned novel, where surface enmity fuels mutual attraction and careful ...”

Strictly Technical

Aijaz Ahmad: India’s Far-Right, 19 March 2020

The RSS: A Menace to India 
by A.G. Noorani.
LeftWord, 547 pp., £33.75, September 2019, 978 81 934666 8 1
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Messengers of Hindu Nationalism: How the RSS Reshaped India 
by Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle.
Hurst, 405 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 78738 025 7
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“... has never given a transparent account of its finances or its members. It claims exemption as a self-styled ‘cultural organisation’ – or, on occasion, ‘charity’ – even though it isn’t at all clear whether it has ever registered itself as such.The RSS has also normalised Hindu nationalist violence. In 2014, around the time of the election, a ...”

The New Grunge

Lauren Oyler, 23 May 2019

Godsend 
by John Wray.
Canongate, 228 pp., £14.99, January 2019, 978 1 78211 962 3
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“... book ends with her spending the night in a ditch, where she’s visited by a vision of her former self, echoing an image of her mother from the beginning of the book, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The extent of Wray’s foreshadowing – which touches most aspects of the novel’s plot – makes the ending feel like a conspiracy. Perhaps it’s paranoid to say ...”

Anti-Slavery Begins at Home

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 25 May 1995

The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child 
by Carolyn Karcher.
Duke, 804 pp., £35.95, March 1995, 0 8223 1485 1
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Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life 
by Joan Hedrick.
Oxford, 507 pp., £25, March 1994, 0 19 506639 1
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“... of scribbling women’ – had not received the highest literary accolades. Only unyielding male self-interest could explain why the impulse to reform that had hastened the Civil War was not allowed to reach fruition, and why women were forced back into their separate sphere. The passage of time and, especially, the appearance of biographies of the leading ...”