Little Goldbug

Iain Bamforth: Tomi Ungerer, 19 July 2001

... of bespectacled Teutons bumbling through Alsatian villages while freshly rinsed children with black bows and tricolour rosettes in their hair laugh at them behind their backs. But there is an older, more harrowing influence evident in Ungerer’s work. When he studied at the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Ungerer used to shelter from the rain in the ...

With or without the ANC

Heribert Adam, 13 June 1991

The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa 
by Julie Frederikse.
Indiana, 304 pp., $39.95, November 1990, 0 253 32473 4
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A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society 
by David Horowitz.
California, 293 pp., $24.95, March 1991, 0 520 07342 8
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Koexistenz im Krieg: Staatszerfall und Entstehung einer Nation im Libanon 
by Theodor Hanf.
Nomos Verlag, 806 pp., September 1990, 3 7890 1972 0
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... tradition may argue about whether non-racialism is merely ‘a form that the struggle takes’ (Max Sisulu) or its essential content and objective. Julie Frederikse, a former Harare-based American journalist, firmly declares it an ‘unbreakable thread’. However, the thread has not yet been tested to breaking-point. Although the relative harmony of ...

Djojo on the Corner

Benedict Anderson, 24 August 1995

After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist 
by Clifford Geertz.
Harvard, 198 pp., £17.95, April 1995, 0 674 00871 5
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... Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation came to adulthood during World War Two, and made their careers during the Cold War, the zenith of ...

At Tate Britain

Gaby Wood: Paula Rego, 7 October 2021

... a girl swallowing a stork, a print too spiky and direct to be suggestive. The etching Baa, Baa, Black Sheep from 1989 was an early flirtation with a feral lover, and in 1990 she depicted Andromeda dismissing a tiny Perseus and reaching up to caress the sea monster instead; in both of these images the woman’s face is hidden. Loving Bewick is in some sense ...

After Seven Hundred Years

Neal Ascherson: Ghosts of East Prussia, 24 May 2012

Forgotten Land: Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia 
by Max Egremont.
Picador, 356 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 330 45660 9
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... also about what did happen in this beautiful, brutally contested and colonised corner of Europe. Max Egremont, a graceful and practised writer, has taken pains to learn its complicated history; he has driven and tramped back and forth across the territory, now divided between three independent nation-states, and he has listened sympathetically to those who ...

Forms of Delirium

Peter Pomerantsev: The Night Wolves, 10 October 2013

... Among the new religious nationalists are the black-clad Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers, who have burned Harry Potter books on the embankment by the Kremlin to protest against J.K. Rowling’s Satanism, and Dmitry Enteo, a wan-faced youth with a goatee, who has made speeches on TV about his plan to throw ...

Wide-Angled

Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...

At MoMA

Hal Foster: Käthe Kollwitz’s Figures, 4 July 2024

... though her art is, it evokes precedents from Rembrandt through Goya and Daumier to her compatriot Max Klinger: she aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ Kollwitz once remarked. ‘But the good artists who follow after genius – and I ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new ...

To Die One’s Own Death

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2020

... human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies – Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur – I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he personally ...

Chop, Chop, Chop

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’, 21 January 2016

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 114 pp., £10, September 2015, 978 0 571 32376 0
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... Max Porter​ ’s compact and splendid book, a polyphonic narrative with elements of the prose poem, cracks open a set of emotions that has become spuriously coherent and tractable. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category ...

Static Opulence

Leah Broad: Delius’s Worldliness, 19 January 2023

The Music of Frederick Delius: Style, Form and Ethos 
by Jeremy Dibble.
Boydell, 564 pp., £40, June 2021, 978 1 78327 577 9
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... that dominated German and Scandinavian theatres in the early 20th century. The Austrian director Max Reinhardt may have been another influence. Delius would most likely have been aware of Reinhardt’s work; the set designer for the Berlin premiere of A Village Romeo and Juliet had previously collaborated with Reinhardt, as had Edvard Munch, with whom Delius ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... created a new world for himself.’ Wright threw in for his protest-ending the communist lawyer. Max, with his appeal to understand Bigger as a victim. But the novel keeps up a distance between this hero’s consciousness of himself and the terms of exculpation arranged for him by the professionals of social sympathy. It was ...

Techno-Sublime

Brian Rotman: Fractals, 7 November 2013

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick 
by Benoit Mandelbrot.
Pantheon, 324 pp., £22.50, October 2012, 978 0 307 37735 7
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... two years in Pasadena. Caltech then boasted a slew of world-changing scientists, and in particular Max Delbrück, who was orchestrating the birth of molecular biology – ‘exhilarating proof that someone with my bent might have a chance after all’. But his work there led nowhere and Mandelbrot returned to France, to serve his compulsory year in the ...

Why do you make me do it?

David Bromwich: Robert Ryan, 18 February 2016

... Racket (1951), Clash by Night (1952), Beware, My Lovely (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Men in War (1957), God’s Little Acre (1958), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), Billy Budd (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In many of these films, Ryan played a bad man; in every one, he was an outsider. The parts are often separately ...