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Why we go to war

Ferdinand Mount, 6 June 2019

... was formerly the greatest coal town in the country. Now the country is ploughland, interspersed by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is ...

The Greatest Geek

Richard Barnett: Nikola Tesla, 5 February 2015

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age 
by W. Bernard Carlson.
Princeton, 520 pp., £19.95, April 2015, 978 0 691 05776 7
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... Europe. In one demonstration at the Royal Institution in February 1892 he spelled out the name of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in electric light and made glass vacuum tubes glow as if by magic. Lord Rayleigh, who was to share a Nobel Prize for the discovery of argon, saw in Tesla ‘the genius of a discoverer’, but others weren’t so ...

Spending Hitler’s Money

Bee Wilson: The D-Day Spies, 19 July 2012

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 417 pp., £16.99, March 2012, 978 1 4088 1990 6
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... Macintyre suggested that conventional histories of the war operated ‘in shades of black and white’ with clear-cut heroes and villains, whereas in his brand of history – which has become a kind of franchise, with this latest volume following his previous bestsellers, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat – the moral lines are more ‘blurred’ and ...

Use Use Use

Robert Baird: Robert Duncan’s Dream, 24 October 2013

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus 
by Lisa Jarnot.
California, 509 pp., £27.95, August 2013, 978 0 520 23416 1
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... my resistant life yield to the light cleavages of what seems true,                 white heights and green deeps. The three major books that followed The Opening of the Field – Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968) and Ground Work: Before the War (1984) – recorded Duncan’s continued search for an art that might ‘tune the ...

As if Life Depended on It

John Mullan: With the Leavisites, 12 September 2013

Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English 
by David Ellis.
Liverpool, 151 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 1 84631 889 4
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English as a Vocation: The ‘Scrutiny’ Movement 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Oxford, 298 pp., £57, May 2012, 978 0 19 969517 1
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The Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow 
by F.R. Leavis.
Cambridge, 118 pp., £10.99, August 2013, 978 1 107 61735 3
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... He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy jacket and the wide-collared white shirt, open to the sternum. He holds a book, closed around his index finger, which is still marking the place. It is as if he has agreed to stop reading for just a moment, so that the photo can be taken. He stares straight at the camera and his expression ...

Get over it!

Corey Robin: Antonin Scalia, 10 June 2010

American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 
by Joan Biskupic.
Farrar, Straus, 434 pp., $28, November 2009, 978 0 374 20289 7
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... to the liberal jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s, has long been criticised by the left. As William Brennan, the liberal titan of the court in the second half of the 20th century, declared in 1985, ‘Those who would restrict claims of right to the values of 1789 specifically articulated in the constitution turn a blind eye to social progress and eschew ...

Thanks for being called Dick

Jenny Turner: ‘I Love Dick’, 17 December 2015

I Love Dick 
by Chris Kraus.
Tuskar Rock, 261 pp., £12.99, November 2015, 978 1 78125 647 3
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... for operating as ‘a money-hustling hag’: noticing how admired her husband is among ‘young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism’, she sets about ‘milking money’ from these ‘Bataille Boys’, renting out Sylvère’s attention for ever higher fees. She invests the money in real estate, buying unpleasant ...

Whisky and Soda Man

Thomas Jones: J.G. Ballard, 10 April 2008

Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton – An Autobiography 
by J.G. Ballard.
Fourth Estate, 278 pp., £14.99, February 2008, 978 0 00 727072 9
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... in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the ...

Diary

Mark Ford: Love and Theft, 2 December 2004

... A spirit storming in blank walls, A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun. My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including the ‘opulent ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since Apocalypse Now: in A Dry White Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays ...

Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan: Valentine Cunningham, 19 September 2002

Reading after Theory 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Blackwell, 194 pp., £45, December 2001, 0 631 22167 0
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... have made us more aware of the competences involved in reading. By rejecting the hegemony of Dead White European Males they have helped to bring such neglected writers as Sarah Fielding into the canon. Theory has drawn attention to marginalised groups, making it harder to ignore the ‘black-creole face of Bertha Mason’ in Jane Eyre. Above all, Theory has ...

Angering and Agitating

Christopher Turner: Freud’s fan club, 30 November 2006

Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones 
by Brenda Maddox.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 7195 6792 0
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... for having ‘conquered America’, and thereby preparing the way for Freud’s own arrival. When William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear him speak, Freud felt that psychoanalysis had been given official recognition for the first time. ‘In Europe I felt as though I were despised,’ he was to write, ‘but over there I ...

Merry Kicks

Mark Ford: The Madness of Marinetti, 20 May 2004

Selected Poems and Related Prose 
by F.T. Marinetti, translated by Elizabeth Napier and Barbara Studholme.
Yale, 250 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 300 04103 9
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... When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! It is only once they are ‘smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot’ that he and his confrères can proclaim their manifesto, and hymn ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
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... Infiltrators and informers posed significant problems for the IRA leadership. The memoir of William Matchett, a former RUC man, stated that at any given time one IRA member in 33 was a Special Branch agent. If one adds agents who were handled by the army and MI5 the total was far higher. Many were never discovered and a few have subsequently written ...

Squealing to Survive

John Lahr: Clancy was here, 19 July 2018

Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos 
by Clancy Sigal.
Icon, 352 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 1 78578 439 2
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The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years 
by Clancy Sigal.
Bloomsbury, 274 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 4088 8580 2
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... pounding the back lots and working the studio corridors, at the age of 29 Clancy drove his red and white DeSoto convertible across America and went into European exile. ‘It came back to this, the sheer shock, in my own country, of walking along the street and seeing faces behind which are no ideas, or even enjoyment. No. No more of this. It was time to ...

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