Convenient Death of a Hero

Arnold Rattenbury, 8 May 1997

Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp., £12.95, December 1996, 0 85036 457 4
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... against which Tito’s Partisans, with British support, were fighting in Yugoslavia. Now, however, self-interest was bringing the country under the increasing influence of an advancing Russia, even while the Comintern, based in Moscow and led by the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, was encouraging Bulgarian Partisans against the Bulgarian Government. In ...

Diary

Alan Hollinghurst: In Houston, 18 March 1999

... independence) into imaginary rambles through my own city (founded 50 BC); and indulging a slightly self-conscious relish for the lanes and livery-halls and melancholy churches of London, alongside a faintly supercilious dismay at the trashiness and sprawl of my temporary home. Bradley has written an enthralling introduction, giving a historical overview of the ...

Clear Tartan Water

Colin Kidd: The election in Scotland, 27 May 1999

... former more an emotional attachment, the latter involving both political allegiance and economic self-interest. More recently, the pattern has shifted: identification with Scotland has grown in intensity, while the tie to England has assumed an emotive dimension. In general, the elderly and the Protestant tend to have stronger feelings of Britishness than ...

Playboy’s Paperwork

Patrick Collinson: Historiography and Elizabethan politics, 11 November 1999

The World of the Favourite 
edited by J.H. Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss.
Yale, 320 pp., £35, June 1999, 0 300 07644 4
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The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-97 
by Paul Hammer.
Cambridge, 468 pp., £45, June 1999, 0 521 43485 8
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... is apparent from the portraits of the favourites, here investigated by Jonathan Brown, icons of self-projection which may be indicative of insecurity and precariousness of defined status as much as of power. For the nominalist, it will be significant that the very word ‘favourite’ originated in this period. Blair Worden’s brilliant and wide-ranging ...

Diary

John Welch: My Analysis, 2 September 1999

... who was always in the Patients’ Club was a musician. I envied him his supply of small talk, his self-deprecating charm, and I tried to overhear his conversations, surrounded as I was by my enormous silence. One day he disappeared from the ward and when he came back, he was pale and utterly washed out. It was not too difficult to save up those pills that ...

Abolish everything!

Andrew Hussey: Situationist International, 2 September 1999

The Situationist City 
by Simon Sadler.
MIT, 248 pp., £24.95, March 1998, 0 262 19392 2
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... urban pleasure: Alfred de Musset, in imitation of De Quincey, described flânerie as a process of self-detachment, in which the subject gives himself up to the ‘spectacle du moment’: ‘J’ai flâné dans les rues: j’ai marché devant moi, libre, bayant aux grues’ (‘I strolled around, I walked ahead of myself, free, gaping at the whores’). Sadler ...

This Condensery

August Kleinzahler: In Praise of Lorine Niedecker, 5 June 2003

Collected Works 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
California, 471 pp., £29.95, May 2002, 0 520 22433 7
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Collected Studies in the Use of English 
by Kenneth Cox.
Agenda, 270 pp., £12, September 2001, 9780902400696
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New Goose 
by Lorine Niedecker, edited by Jenny Penberthy.
Listening Chamber, 98 pp., $10, January 2002, 0 9639321 6 0
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... persona, a breadth of voice, a large collection of masks, the favourite being timid, little, self-effacing Lorine. ‘Lorine was shy and unworldly,’ Jerry Reisman wrote, ‘but she was lively and talkative when with people she liked. Her sense of humour sparkled in conversation as it does in her poetry and sometimes she was surprisingly ...

High-Meriting, Low-Descended

John Mullan: The Unpolished Pamela, 12 December 2002

Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded 
by Samuel Richardson, edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely.
Oxford, 592 pp., £6.99, June 2001, 0 19 282960 2
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... were ‘low’ because an educated, erudite, gentlemanly writer was stooping. For Richardson, the self-made former apprentice boy, who later gave Clarissa the appearance of literariness by inserting gobbets from a dictionary of literary ‘beauties’, the charge was altogether more significant. The originality of Pamela was its transformation of ...

The Death of a Poet

Penelope Fitzgerald: Charlotte Mew, 23 May 2002

... a rambling sailor waiting for her on every quay. These images, projected at random from the buried self, create the poem in their own right. They are romantic images; but death was also ‘the whole dreadful heap’ which she had witnessed often enough, and the time when she would not have to think any more, or even be.‘I mean to go through the door without ...

Baleful Smile of the Crocodile

Neal Ascherson: D.S. Mirsky, 8 March 2001

D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life 1890-1939 
by G.S. Smith.
Oxford, 398 pp., £65, June 2000, 0 19 816006 2
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... many Bloomsbury figures, he had practically no friends. He worked with extraordinary intensity and self-discipline, producing books, essays and translations of the highest quality, but he was always poor. Contemporaries remembered how badly dressed he was, in a threadbare, tweedy way. And all, almost without exception, remembered his dreadful teeth. Leonard ...

‘You have to hang on’

Eugen Weber: Mihail Sebastian, 15 November 2001

Journal 1935-44 
by Mihail Sebastian, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Heinemann, 641 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 434 88577 0
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... And anti-semitism. Romania’s problem was not just a lack of men who were sufficiently virile and self-sacrificing: the country was being suffocated by a surfeit of Jews, with their predatory activities compounding their parasitic presence. Accounting for 800,000 out of a total population of around 19 million, Jews were particularly visible in the regions of ...

Welcome Home

Sukhdev Sandhu: Memories of Michael X, 4 February 1999

Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain 
by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.
HarperCollins, 422 pp., £16.99, May 1998, 0 00 255909 9
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... 1975, he was hanged in Port of Spain’s Royal Jail. Michael X was a huckster, an opportunistic self-shaper who managed to maximise the returns on his racial background. Like every con-man’s story, his is fascinating and it’s a pity that Windrush does not feature more like it. It’s also noticeable that while the authors are given to romanticising ...

Productive Mischief

Michael Wood: Borges and Borges and I, 4 February 1999

Collected Fictions 
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley.
Allen Lane, 565 pp., £20, January 1999, 0 14 028680 2
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... that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his writing. In one of his early prose works, The Universal History of Infamy (1935), Borges says of Billy the Kid that he ‘never fully measured up to the legend of himself, but he came closer ...

The misogynists got it right

Christine Stansell: The representation of women in art, 1 July 1999

Representing Women 
by Linda Nochlin.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £14.99, May 1999, 0 500 28098 3
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... Where did their freedom of movement, their composure come from? What consequences did their self-sufficiency have? Men stared and remarked and observed: women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a ...

Truckers’ Tantrums

Edward Luttwak: Put up the price of oil, 5 October 2000

... south-west United States, expensive houses abundantly equipped with solar panels to offer energy self-sufficiency, or near enough, were much in demand in the 1970s – there was even something of a boom in cave-houses, luxurious villas semi-submerged in the ground for better insulation in both winter and summer. It was the same in industry. After 1973, much ...