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Lorna Sage: Henry Green, 25 January 2001

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Faber, 340 pp., £25, September 2000, 0 571 16898 1
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... of steam in Liverpool, en route to Canada – they cannot, when it comes to it, plunge into the unknown, they’re defeated by the amorphousness of their personalities, being products of the present time. Landlocked, they panic at the smell of the sea: Lily has the horrors as the searchlight from a lighthouse sweeps the sky: ‘She would not look up again ...

Escape of a Half-Naked Sailor

P.N. Furbank: ‘Three Queer Lives’, 29 November 2001

Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob and Arthur Marshall 
by Paul Bailey.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 0 241 13455 2
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... breaking of the rules of orthodox ‘masculine’ behaviour, engendered a freak, a monster, unknown to the species or to ordinary human society. Why this was so, I would think, is because ‘queening’ is, or was (maybe it has pretty much gone out in our post-Wolfenden days), an acting-out of self-hatred or desperate self-mockery. The thought occurred ...

Diary

Joseph Farrell: In Palermo, 14 December 2000

... writing in general, is deep. Only one of his novels is available in English. The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, which I translated in 1994, is an antidote to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, presenting the landing of Garibaldi and the coming to power of a new class from the point of view not of the aristocracy but of the peasantry. His most recent novel is Lo ...

If they’re ill, charge them extra

James Meek: Flamingo Plucking, 21 March 2002

Salt: A World History 
by Mark Kurlansky.
Cape, 452 pp., £17.99, February 2002, 0 224 06084 8
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Salt: Grain of Life 
by Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader.
Columbia, 220 pp., £15.95, July 2001, 0 231 12198 9
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... Caribbean, were too shy or too polite ever to tell their Imperial masters that frost and snow were unknown to them, and that the white mounds were heaps of the only product that made money in Turks and Caicos: salt. By the time the Turks and Caicos got their mad flag, most Victorians in the home country thought of salt, if they thought of it at all, as ...

The Amazing …

Jonathan Lethem: My Spidey, 6 June 2002

Spider-Man 
directed by Sam Raimi.
May 2002
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... in the mysterious depth of newer and less popular characters: the Vision, Black Bolt, Omega the Unknown, Warlock, Ghost Rider, Son of Satan (was there really a comic book called Son of Satan? Yes), all of whom were brooding, tormented anti-heroes, unattractive to young children. We’d caught the outsiderish, sulky Marvel scent, and wanted our own share. In ...

Maybe he made it up

Terry Eagleton: Faking It, 6 June 2002

The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature 
by Nick Groom.
Picador, 351 pp., £20, April 2002, 9780330374323
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... contrast with forgery. There is, in fact, a fourth category, known to the Irish (but apparently unknown to Groom) as ‘anti-plagiarism’. This little-known genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary ...

Into the Future

David Trotter: The Novel, 22 March 2007

The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 916 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04947 5
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The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 950 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04948 3
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... from the tenth century, but not collected until some time between the 14th and 16th centuries, and unknown in Europe before the 18th. Franco Moretti, the editor of this vast two-volume anthology of essays, itself a redaction of an original five-volume work published in Italian under the title Il Romanzo, has his eye on something other than an island story. The ...

Like choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato

Christopher Tayler: The Wryness of Julian Barnes, 15 April 2004

The Lemon Table 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 213 pp., £16.99, March 2004, 9780224071987
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... and a persecuted sense of having been trapped into the present situation by a person or persons unknown’. Barnes likes to confront the gloomy facts of existence from time to time. But he doesn’t usually do it this openly: the house rules forbid. Instead, he proceeds by indirection. Staring at the Sun is, among other things, an extended play on one of La ...

Don’t Die

Jenny Diski: Among the Handbags, 1 November 2007

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre 
by Dana Thomas.
Allen Lane, 375 pp., £20, September 2007, 978 0 7139 9823 8
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... one he discovers that all the other members of the family are wearing an article of clothing in an unknown way, or have run up a frock or made a sweater or decorated their dungarees to look startlingly different. When he asks about it, they each tell him they just sort of thought they would, no big deal, gotta milk the cow, chop some wood, see ya. He stays a ...

Double Thought

Michael Wood: Kafka in the Office, 20 November 2008

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings 
edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner, translated by Eric Patton and Ruth Hein.
Princeton, 404 pp., £26.95, November 2008, 978 0 691 12680 7
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... is precisely the scope of the word, and we cannot pretend that any place on the spectrum is really unknown to us. Many of the cases Kafka encounters in his work tell just this story: the large posters listing safety regulations but used only to replace broken windows; the lift that a rooming-house owner (who doesn’t want to pay the premium for the insurance ...

To Be Worth Forty Shillings

Jonah Miller: Early Modern Inequality, 2 February 2017

Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England 
by Alexandra Shepard.
Oxford, 357 pp., £65, February 2015, 978 0 19 960079 3
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... of slavery … exposing every man’s house to be entered into and searched at pleasure by persons unknown to him’, and was replaced in 1696 by the less intrusive window tax. The material trappings of private life evolved as even poor households invested in valuable bedding, pewter and linen rather than cows and sheep, and credit-bearing assets were ...

The Planet That Wasn’t There

Thomas Jones: Phantom Planets, 19 January 2017

The Hunt for Vulcan: How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet and Deciphered the Universe 
by Thomas Levenson.
Head of Zeus, 229 pp., £7.99, August 2016, 978 1 78497 398 8
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... Orgères-en-Beauce, between Chartres and Orléans. Nine months earlier, Lescarbault had watched an unknown object pass across the face of the Sun. Le Verrier rushed to Orgères, where Lescarbault ‘permitted us to examine his instruments closely and gave us the most detailed explanations of his work’, which ‘gave us total conviction that the detailed ...

‘Our citizenship is expensive!’

Kristin Surak, 22 September 2016

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen 
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.
Columbia Global Reports, 166 pp., £10, November 2015, 978 0 9909763 6 3
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... regularly close for lack of supplies, teachers haven’t been paid in months and tourists are unknown. On the largest island, 60 per cent of the inhabitants have access to electricity, while only 20 per cent of those on the smallest island do. Since gaining independence from France in 1975, the Comoros has seen twenty coups. Behind many of them was Bob ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... such as spitting blood (usually a sign of tuberculosis). Whether the Herball was effective is unknown, but Stephen Rutherford, who brings a biomedical perspective to his reading of civil war surgical texts, finds much to admire. There was an understanding, at least among military surgeons like Richard Wiseman (a royalist), of the refracted trajectory of a ...

Pinhookers and Pets

Jackson Lears: Inventing the Non-Smoker, 18 February 2021

The Cigarette: A Political History 
by Sarah Milov.
Harvard, 395 pp., £28.95, October 2019, 978 0 674 24121 3
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... equality were risibly unconvincing. At a time when the dangers of second-hand smoke were largely unknown, the impulse behind non-smokers’ rights wasn’t scientific but civic – ‘a vision of public space as an amenity to be consumed’, as Milov puts it. Non-smokers demanded to be spared the unpleasantness of smoky restaurants, planes and bus ...

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