English Proust

Christopher Prendergast, 8 July 1993

In Search of Lost Time 
by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright.
Chatto, £15, November 1992, 0 7011 3992 7
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... fussiness and fascination, and after some of the more extended stretches chez les Guermantes it may well be with a sigh of relief that we find even the narrator himself giving up: ‘I should never get to the end of it if I began to describe all the different types of drawing-room.’ A translation must of course respect the assumptions of the original; but ...

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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... his most experimental and politically committed work to date, a direct response to the upheaval of May 1968. The next year Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin founded a Maoist film-making collective, the Dziga Vertov group, named after the Soviet agitprop film-maker of the Twenties, founder of the Kino-Eye movement. Starting with ideas about ‘Brechtian’ or ...

On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... James had grasped the basis of that paradox in white freedom and black servitude. Although there may seem to be nothing amusing about this racial division, the United States created the first mass culture in the world, blackface minstrelsy, to have fun with it. Minstrelsy – originally whites masquerading as black – was the obverse of racial passing ...

A Dream in the Presence of Reason

Clive James, 15 October 1981

L’opera in versi 
by Eugenio Montale, edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini.
Einaudi, 1225 pp., £26.15
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Xenia and Motets 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Kate Hughes.
Agenda, 45 pp., £3, December 1980, 0 902400 25 8
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The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano 
edited by Michael Palma.
Princeton, 254 pp., £9.30, July 1981, 0 691 06467 9
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... has been heavily scored by a student and sold after the examination has been passed or failed, he may possibly make up in spiritual resource for the previous owner’s geographical advantage. While emphatically disclaiming the title of linguist, Montale was a devoted reader in the other European languages, and something of what he undoubtedly got out of them ...

Comrades in Monetarism

John Lloyd, 28 May 1992

... been the fate of every other government which came to power to tidy up the Communist mess. Gaidar may have been used to the world of power and influence, but none of the others, save briefly Shokhin, had climbed the long Soviet ladder to power: they had been catapulted into office at what was for a gerontocratic country a ludicrously young age. They soon ...

A Revision of Expectations

Richard Horton: Notes on the NHS, 2 July 1998

The National Health Service: A Political History 
by Charles Webster.
Oxford, 233 pp., £9.99, April 1998, 0 19 289296 7
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... to the level he inherited from the Conservatives. The results of a comprehensive spending review may allow Gordon Brown to give the NHS an extra £1.5-2 billion to mark the 50th-anniversary celebrations. If that happens, it will be a huge victory for Dobson. There are other difficulties facing him, however, which he might prefer to ignore. His most serious ...

The Shoreham Gang

Seamus Perry: Samuel Palmer, 5 April 2012

Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer 
by Rachel Campbell-Johnston.
Bloomsbury, 382 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7475 9587 8
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... letters are often painfully docile. ‘Have I not been a good boy?’ he wrote from Shoreham. ‘I may safely boast that I have not entertain’d a single imaginative thought these six weeks, while I am drawing from Nature vision seems foolishness to me.’ Writing to Richmond, meanwhile, he sounded the mixed note of dependence and irritable resistance that ...

Marx at 193

John Lanchester, 5 April 2012

... different aspects of which might be in play at different times, with the result that a proletarian may find himself competing against other proletarians even though their class interests are aligned. The fact is that in the modern world our selves are far more fragmented and contradictory than that. Many workers have pensions invested in companies whose route ...

Fraudpocalypse

John Lanchester, 4 August 2022

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth 
by Dan McCrum.
Bantam, 326 pp., £20, June 2022, 978 1 78763 504 3
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... had known nothing about the scandal, and hadn’t read a warning memo about it sent to him in May 2014 – which was lucky, because if he had, his subsequent actions would have amounted to fraud, and he would probably have gone to prison. A good day to flake on the paperwork, Herr Winterkorn! But maybe skip the trip to Disneyland, OK?The​ other story of ...

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7
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Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
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... across the kingdom. Any account must be pointillist in character. The danger, however, is that we may miss the significant shapes that emerge from these myriad individual points. An extra hazard is that many of the documents have been misdated in the past and need putting in the right chronological order (Clark’s text itself has accumulated a tally of small ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...

Rigging the Death Rate

Paul Taylor, 11 April 2013

... to the analysis makes the point that while the rigour and complexity of the statistical analysis may have ensured an authoritative answer to the question ‘Was Bristol an outlier?’, that very complexity made it harder to answer the really pressing question: ‘Shouldn’t the Bristol surgeons have known that they were outliers?’ After the Bristol ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... present book, though clear and readable, tactful and scholarly, is a bit less streamlined. This may be because Lee has made much use of the live memories and personal archives of Fitzgerald’s children, and so is walking on eggshells in places. It has also been suggested that Fitzgerald herself may have done what she ...

Whose sarin?

Seymour M. Hersh, 19 December 2013

... evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies. Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the ...

Dye the Steak Blue

Lidija Haas: Shirley Jackson, 19 August 2010

Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories 
edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
Library of America, 827 pp., $35, May 2010, 978 1 59853 072 8
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... that the buildings are showing signs of decay, that the seemingly vital city is crumbling and may fall apart. The speeding cars and bustling people are increasingly menacing. The story’s climax comes when Margaret finds herself unable to cross the street to get to where they are staying. Like many of Jackson’s characters, she has a moment of ...