Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9
Show More
Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4
Show More
Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8
Show More
Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6
Show More
Show More
... film strips, children’s books, television sets. Eisner’s panels often float against black Expressionist nights or lightly inked Center City skylines. Some scenes are framed by purely visual devices: the beam of a flashlight, the viewfinder of a telescope, the jagged outlines of a bombed wall, the round windows in the door of a restaurant ...

Scribblers and Assassins

Charles Nicholl: The Crimes of Thomas Drury, 31 October 2002

... and Buckhurst had in mind when they granted him his freedom from the Marshalsea. In this game of black propaganda, Thomas Drury increasingly emerges as a kind of impresario, a purveyor of these incriminating texts to the authorities. But who was he? He has proved elusive (not least because there is more than one Thomas Drury around at this time) but I can ...

A Young Woman Who Was Meant to Kill Herself

Jeremy Harding: Charlotte Salomon, 8 March 2018

Life? Or Theatre? 
by Charlotte Salomon.
Duckworth, 840 pp., £125, September 2017, 978 1 715 65247 0
Show More
Charlotte 
by David Foenkinos, translated by Sam Taylor.
Canongate, 224 pp., £8.99, January 2018, 978 1 78211 796 4
Show More
Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory 
by Griselda Pollock.
Yale, 542 pp., £45, March 2018, 978 0 300 10072 3
Show More
Charlotte Salomon: ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ A Selection of 450 Gouaches 
by Judith Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch.
Taschen, 599 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 3 8365 7077 0
Show More
Show More
... this is daytime, but the light in these final moments of the main section is leaden, like ‘the black milk of daylight’ in Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’: we can’t tell dusk from dawn. All the same, we can put a date to it: Salomon left Germany in December 1938. Her grandparents, Ludwig and Marianne, were living with Ottilie Moore, an American heiress, on ...

That’s what Wystan says

Seamus Perry, 10 May 2018

Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography 
by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 912 pp., £27.95, May 2017, 978 0 691 17249 1
Show More
Show More
... his superhuman consumption of Player’s, and all the benzedrine, could hardly have helped. But Michael Davidson, an early mentor, was not alone in seeking a more symbolic explanation and in seeing ‘those singular corrugations’ as the ‘seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion’. Auden seemed in later years to have been encased behind a great ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
Show More
The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
Show More
Show More
... scale was palatial. The only domestic architecture which matched them were occasional outbreaks of black and white apartments. Hanger Hill Garden Estate in Ealing was puffed by Nairn: ‘A half-timbered square mile, and marvellous nonsense. Go and see!’ Stamp is drier, analytical: ‘The elements [are] used in such a way as not to pretend that they are ...

Seagulls as Playmates

Colm Tóibín: Where the Islanders Went, 20 February 2025

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World 
by Patrick Joyce.
Allen Lane, 384 pp., £10.99, February, 978 0 14 199873 2
Show More
Show More
... Maingín … All three men have now died … Carrying their mark – the height of my kin, their black hair – I share these bodies, our genes, a collective deep history.’Joyce’s father was born in 1907 in south Mayo. His grandfather doesn’t appear in the 1911 census: he was in Pittsburgh with his eldest son, Pat. ‘My grandfather crossed over and ...

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

... How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
Show More
Show More
... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
Show More
Show More
... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
Show More
Show More
... seeks to avoid can be seen from another version which forms the most instructive contrast with it, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. Unlike Berlin’s, Walzer’s pluralism is designed to reconcile differing values within any society by allocating separate regions of jurisdiction to each – consumption, welfare, office-holding, art – in a normative ...

The ‘People’s War’

Pankaj Mishra: The Maoists of Nepal, 23 June 2005

... as he sat on the verandah of his two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead. He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And, given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
Show More
Show More
... Body Shop bottles on the bathroom shelf – Duse exudes, well, a certain sublimity. She’s all in black, in some kind of elegant, judicial-looking, Portia-like robe, and leans against a Greek column on a terrace, head tilted up to the heavens. She’s obviously standing on a stage – there’s a pale cardboard mountain and painted cataract in the far ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
Show More
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
Show More
Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
Show More
Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
Show More
Show More
... presence somewhere offstage: ‘dark Ahab’, ‘wild Ahab’, ‘moody stricken Ahab’, ‘black terrific Ahab’, ‘crazy Ahab’, ‘inflexible Ahab’, ‘untottering Ahab’, Ahab with his ‘despot eye’. It would be strange, all the same, if our appreciation of his tragic character, his Promethean ambition and his radicalism – the ability to ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
Show More
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
Show More
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
Show More
Show More
... ascent. In July 1933, he married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Second Earl of Iveagh, whose black stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of ...