Like What Our Peasants Still Are

Landeg White: Afrocentrism, 13 May 1999

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes 
by Stephen Howe.
Verso, 337 pp., £22, June 1998, 1 85984 873 7
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... in the ethnic nationalism he deplores – at times with a sarcasm that seems misplaced. When Jerome Schiele innocently remarks that in traditional African philosophy ‘there is no perceptual separation of the individual from other people,’ he is savagely put down with the comment: ‘a bit confusing when one is ...

Buggering on

Paul Addison, 21 July 1983

Winston Churchill: Companion Vol. V, Part III, The Coming of War 1936-1939 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1684 pp., £75, October 1982, 0 434 29188 9
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Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939-1941 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1308 pp., £15.95, June 1983, 0 434 29187 0
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Churchill 1874-1915 
by Ted Morgan.
Cape, 571 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 224 02044 7
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The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 
by William Manchester.
Michael Joseph, 973 pp., £14.95, June 1983, 0 7181 2275 5
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... individualist and buccaneer, he resembled in type his dare-devil New York grandfather, Leonard Jerome. In Britain we mistrust the heady American mix of the hard sell accompanied by the affirmation of a semi-religious faith in civic values. But Churchill epitomised it with his tireless self-promotion and rhetorical ...

Mongkut and I

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 30 January 1992

The Romance of the Harem 
by Anna Leonowens, edited by Susan Morgan.
Virginia, 285 pp., £10.50, August 1991, 0 8139 1328 4
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... Hammerstein brilliantly capitalised on these various reflections of Stowe’s novel when they had Jerome Robbins choreograph a ballet based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the women of the harem, with the soon to be runaway Tuptim in the role of Eliza, fleeing the cruelty of ‘King Simon of Legree’. While the ballet has no ...

God’s Will

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: Do you speak Punic?, 22 May 2003

Bilingualism and the Latin Language 
by J.N. Adams.
Cambridge, 836 pp., £100, January 2003, 0 521 81771 4
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... bright Heracles imagines Zeus might do in Aristophanes’ Birds. However, although Adams discusses Jerome, Augustine and other Christian authors intermittently, there is no general consideration of the effect on the Latin spoken by Christians of subliterary Greek, itself subject to Hebrew or Aramaic interference; valuable ...

Pirouette on a Sixpence

Christopher Prendergast: Untranslatables, 10 September 2015

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon 
edited by Barbara Cassin, translated by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood.
Princeton, 1297 pp., £44.95, February 2014, 978 0 691 13870 1
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... meaning (vis) and not to a word (verba).’ In respect of his own work as translator of the Bible, Jerome (a methodological follower of Cicero) distinguished verbum e verbo from sensum de sensu, and claimed to ‘have not translated the words, but rather the ideas’. In the Middle Ages translatio included the principle of ...

Like choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato

Christopher Tayler: The Wryness of Julian Barnes, 15 April 2004

The Lemon Table 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 213 pp., £16.99, March 2004, 9780224071987
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... Julian Barnes’s new book of short stories is concerned with old age and death. Barnes – who was born in 1946 – should have a few years to go before he experiences either condition, but his fiction has always been precociously interested in both. He visited the afterlife, in the person of a cartoon suburbanite, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989 ...

Highlight of Stay So Far

Stefan Collini: Beckett’s Letters, 1 December 2016

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Vol. IV: 1966-89 
edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 838 pp., £29.99, September 2016, 978 0 521 86796 2
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... Faced​ with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this may have been a slip, allowing the possibility of there having been an ‘up’ from which to come down. Usually his defences were in place in advance: ‘All is I suppose as well as can be expected by one with my powers of expectation ...

Age of Hypochondriacs

Josephine Quinn: On the Antonine Plague, 15 August 2024

Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World 
by Colin Elliott.
Princeton, 304 pp., £28, April, 978 0 691 21915 8
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... it ended. Galen mentions further waves after the initial crisis, and the hyperbolic theologian Jerome later claimed that an outbreak in 172 almost wiped out the Roman army, but nothing more is heard of the disease after the mid-170s. Nor do we know where it came from. Ancient sources insist that Roman soldiers brought it ...

On Needing to Be Looked After

Tim Parks: Beckett’s Letters, 1 December 2011

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56 
edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 791 pp., £30, September 2011, 978 0 521 86794 8
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... At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping … for rejection’, his best work is finally to be published with enthusiasm by editors determined to let the world know what they have discovered, the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... light on how we arrived in our current situation, with three centrists – Biden, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell – undertaking an experiment in economic policy of historic proportions.In the 1970s Krugman belonged to a generation of young lions at MIT, then the pre-eminent economics department in the US. The prevailing ...

In one era and out the other

John North, 7 April 1994

Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Vol II: Historical Chronology 
by Anthony Grafton.
Oxford, 766 pp., £65, December 1993, 0 19 920601 5
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... satellites came from the four corners of Europe in increasing numbers. He did more editing – Jerome, Syncellus and so on – and made further studies of Greek chronography. He published a lengthy but more systematic work on calendars and epochs, Thesaurus temporum (1606). He spent much time in his last years defending ...

A Messiah in the Family

Walter Nash, 8 February 1990

Kingdom come 
by Bernice Rubens.
Hamish Hamilton, 312 pp., £12.99, February 1990, 0 241 12481 6
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The Other Side 
by Mary Gordon.
Bloomsbury, 337 pp., £13.99, January 1990, 0 7475 0473 3
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The Alchemist 
by Mark Illis.
Bloomsbury, 244 pp., £13.95, January 1990, 0 7475 0468 7
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The way you tell them: A Yarn of the Nineties 
by Alan Brownjohn.
Deutsch, 145 pp., £11.95, January 1990, 0 233 98496 8
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... melding and mutating into the shape of Mr Melody as well as migrating into the form of one Jerome the Evangelist, a showman whose theological doctrines are strikingly similar to those professed by Mrs Thatcher. Billy decides that this damned metamorphic magus must be exposed – and expose him he does, by locking him ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: How the Homing Pigeons Lost Their Way, 12 December 1996

... only once: he worked for Methuen as a rep, and he was happy to take the credit for the success of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. But he homed back to the pigeons soon enough. ‘There was nothing else in his life,’ says his son. ‘He ...

Floating Hair v. Blue Pencil

Frank Kermode, 6 June 1996

Revision and Romantic Authorship 
by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 354 pp., £40, March 1996, 0 19 812264 0
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... of the matter, Leader aligns himself with the modern critical school associated with the name of Jerome McGann and with his attack on what he calls ‘the Romantic ideology’, a disease of the original Romantics from which all criticism of them continues to suffer, or anyway did until McGann and his friends administered a ...

Haute Booboisie

Wendy Lesser: H.L. Mencken, 6 July 2006

Mencken: The American Iconoclast 
by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
Oxford, 662 pp., £19.99, January 2006, 0 19 507238 3
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... provoke, and Rodgers duly quotes one of the feminist responses, a rather ponderous satire by Helen Jerome. But Rodgers herself remains silent on the subject. In fact, Rodgers’s silences are the strangest aspect of this biography. Sometimes they are speaking silences, for example, when she uses one short sentence to end a ...