The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... approach predicts the incommensurability of sufficiently divergent outlooks, anticipating Thomas Kuhn on the structure of scientific revolutions by more than thirty years. He went on to interpret causal laws and conditional statements not in terms of causal or conditional facts but by appeal to rules for judgment. To hold that if A happens B will ...

Funhouse Mirror

Christopher L. Brown: ‘Capitalism and Slavery’, 14 December 2023

Capitalism and Slavery 
by Eric Williams.
Penguin, 304 pp., £9.99, February 2022, 978 0 241 54816 5
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... themselves. One sign of this is the praise Williams extends to some abolitionists – Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsay, James Stephen the father, and James Stephen the son – and not others.Capitalism and Slavery​ has very little to say about the anti-slavery movement itself. Williams praised its less compromised progenitors like Clarkson and ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and ...

Slim for Britain

Susan Pedersen: Solidarity Economy, 23 January 2025

The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire 
by Tehila Sasson.
Princeton, 298 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 0 691 25038 0
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... producing her book. It began life as a dissertation written at Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Laqueur and James Vernon, whose students have done so much to document the way neoliberalism shaped every aspect of British life – financial markets, town planning, culture, humanitarianism. (Sasson thanks Berkeley faculty and graduate students, and 52 ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... goes for me too.23 September. I knew Hilary Mantel was a good writer long before she fell for Thomas Cromwell (and it was a kind of love affair). I read her earlier novel Every Day Is Mother’s Day about a Northern social worker and found its dialogue funny and enviable. Her much lauded characterisation of Cromwell was harder to take, my feeling being ...

This place is pryson

Mary Wellesley: Living in Her Own Grave, 23 May 2019

Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550 
edited by E.A. Jones.
Manchester, 232 pp., £18.99, January 2019, 978 1 5261 2723 5
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... reveal that money was often bequeathed. In other cases, bread or books were donated. In 1435, William Fylham, canon of Exeter Cathedral, left ‘three canonical loaves’ per week, for a year, to an anchorite at the church of St Leonard. A decade earlier Thomas Dunham, rector of Little Torrington, left twenty shillings ...

Smoke and Lava

Rosemary Hill: Vesuvius Observed, 5 October 2023

Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions 
by John Brewer.
Yale, 513 pp., £30, October, 978 0 300 27266 6
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... wine, Lacryma Christi. The experience brought out something reckless in even the most serious. William Hamilton, who did more than anyone to further vulcanology as an academic study, made the ascent during the 1767 eruption in the company of the art historian Johann Winckelmann. They were travelling with the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, who had written a ...

Guns, Money and Opium

Laleh Khalili, 19 February 2026

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces 
by Seth Harp.
Viking, 357 pp., £22.50, August 2025, 978 0 593 65508 5
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... Minh trail, proxy paramilitaries were given ‘cash on delivery’, a 2009 memoir by the CIA agent Thomas Leo Briggs claimed. SOG officers were also involved in provoking clashes in the Gulf of Tonkin between US and North Vietnamese forces, leading to the eponymous resolution that resulted in Indochina being flooded with ground troops.After the formal entry of ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...

Most Himself

Matthew Reynolds: Dryden, 19 July 2007

The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. V 1697-1700 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 707 pp., £113.99, July 2005, 0 582 49214 9
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Dryden: Selected Poems 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 856 pp., £19.99, February 2007, 978 1 4058 3545 9
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... To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the Panther). Historical chronicle (Annus Mirabilis). Translation: from Homer, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and others; and of ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...

Brussels Pout

Ian Penman: Baudelaire’s Bad End, 16 March 2023

Late Fragments: ‘Flares’, ‘My Heart Laid Bare’, Prose Poems, ‘Belgium Disrobed’ 
by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Sieburth.
Yale, 427 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 27049 5
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... the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic ...

Physicke from Another Body

Michael Neill: Cannibal Tinctures, 1 December 2011

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture 
by Louise Noble.
Palgrave Macmillan, 241 pp., £52, March 2011, 978 0 230 11027 4
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Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians 
by Richard Sugg.
Routledge, 374 pp., £24.99, June 2011, 978 0 415 67417 1
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... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet

Barbara Everett: The Sonnets, 8 May 2008

... that needs to be borne in mind. There are a lot of 16th-century sonnets. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished; some is haunting, such as ...