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A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...

How messy it all is

David Runciman: Who benefits from equality?, 22 October 2009

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better 
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
Allen Lane, 331 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84614 039 6
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... with a more equal pay structure. From 2001-5 the two most unequal teams (the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox) won the greatest number of games; the two most equal teams (the Colorado Rockies and Kansas City Royals) won the fewest. You can see the same thing happening in English football: very rich, inegalitarian Chelsea do better than relatively ...

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

... Where you from anyway, the New York Times?’ The convention floor was less glitzy than it was in Boston, less neon, more intimate. The Bush crowd will spend the week in a show of machismo – how tough we are, how resolute – while their every move would show itself to be defensive. In its heart the administration knows it’s in trouble, and it ...

We Are All Victims Now

Thomas Laqueur: Trauma, 8 July 2010

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood 
by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, translated by Rachel Gomme.
Princeton, 305 pp., £44.95, July 2009, 978 0 691 13752 0
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... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...

Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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... already black commas. She circles back to certain touchstones: a visit to a tattoo shop in Boston, summers working as a nanny, a brief teenage encounter with an Estonian man, the widow Mangada. ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is based on the ‘Hospital Notes’ Plath took down when she ‘worked part-time as a secretary in the adult ...
... culture’ of the sort we nostalgically project on the 18th-century Paris salon, the 19th-century Boston drawing room, or the Manhattan loft of the 1930s, is a debatable question. What seems beyond dispute is that academic criticism is at the centre of whatever literary culture we do have at the present time. This is something to which all its opponents ...

Lowellship

John Bayley, 17 September 1987

Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry 
edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese.
Cambridge, 377 pp., £17.50, June 1987, 0 571 14979 0
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Collected Prose 
by Robert Lowell, edited and introduced by Robert Giroux.
Faber, 269 pp., £27.50, February 1987, 0 521 30872 0
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... Marjorie Perloff cannot resist remarking that the dancer ‘did not know who the Lowells of Boston were, and did not fully appreciate that her lover was a Great Poet’. More to the point, perhaps, Lowell’s behaviour was not only that of a poet-king in disguise but that of a tycoon acting in the normal way. Axelrod spends much of his introductory ...

Shoe-Contemplative

David Bromwich: Hazlitt, 18 June 1998

The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 382 pp., £22.50, June 1998, 0 571 17421 3
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... what need is there for teachers of morality or religion? Emerson, a familiar listener to the Boston liturgy written by Hazlitt’s father, took this view of the matter in his ‘Divinity School Address’. He remembered the sensation of being cooped up in the house of worship with the faithful, while outside he could see a truer subject of ...

Grumpy in October

Jonathan Parry: The Anglo-French Project, 21 April 2022

Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire 
by Edward J. Gillin.
Amberley, 288 pp., £20, February 2022, 978 1 3981 0289 7
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... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... got her as far. She married John Moore in 1885 in her father’s church and settled down in a Boston suburb where Moore thought he had prospects. Marianne’s brother, Warner, was born the following year. The prospects didn’t materialise and by the time of Marianne’s birth a year after that, John Moore was in an insane asylum. Mary left him to the ...

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry 
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0
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Diana Vreeland 
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1
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... suggesting that their days were as exciting as yours could become. In 1930 Rubinstein told the Boston Post: ‘Women have a duty to keep young. We should live adventurous lives, travel, work hard, earn money, spend it, love someone deeply, have children.’ She announced that she had ‘an apartment in Paris, a mansion in Mayfair, a penthouse in New York ...

Cronyism and Clientelism

Peter Geoghegan, 5 November 2020

... testing. Deloitte has hired a thousand consultants to work on Test and Trace, including forty from Boston Consulting Group, some of whom are being paid at least £6250 a day.The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, told Parliament that more than £12 billion had been provided for Test and Trace. Serco has been the biggest beneficiary, with a contract that could be worth ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... pounds of goods – three times the amount the Tea Partiers, also dressed as Natives, dumped into Boston harbour eight years later.After the revolution broke out, most tribes treated the conflict as a British civil war. But the results were often dire for them: the Shawnee and the Delaware were pushed west of the Mississippi; the Haudenosaunee ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
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Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
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True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
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Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
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... about killing: Now the first guy you kill is always the hardest. I don’t care if you’re the Boston Strangler or Wyatt Earp ... Now, the second one, while it ain’t no Mardi Gras, it ain’t half as tough as the first ... The third one’s easy. It’s gotten to the point now I’ll do it just to watch their expression change. This is grisly but ...

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