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Insurrectionary Hopes

Matthew Kelly: Myths of 1916, 1 December 2005

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion 
by Charles Townshend.
Allen Lane, 442 pp., £20, September 2005, 0 7139 9690 0
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... of the Home Rule party, were the Fenians, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the self-appointed guardians of the separatist, republican tradition. Very much in a minority, Fenianism was nevertheless a crucial presence in Irish nationalism, representing ideals that few constitutional politicians could afford openly to ignore. Irish MPs paid ...

Damaged Beasts

James Wood: Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’, 8 June 2006

Theft: A Love Story 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 269 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 571 23147 0
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... abiding subject, addressed in novel after novel – is the hoax of Australian identity, and its self-tortured relationship with the rest of the world. The narrator of Illywhacker, Herbert Badgery, is a self-confessed liar and conman who discovers, while in prison, a history of Australia by M.V. Anderson (Carey’s ...

Giving Hysteria a Bad Name

Jenny Diski: At home with the Mellys, 17 November 2005

Take a Girl like Me: Life with George 
by Diana Melly.
Chatto, 280 pp., £14.99, July 2005, 0 7011 7906 6
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Slowing Down 
by George Melly.
Viking, 221 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 0 670 91409 6
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... for suggesting any possible alternative to dismissing her book for the monstrous piece of self-serving narcissism that it appears to be. However, there is the likelihood that Diana Melly is not in fact treading a spiritual path (only perhaps leading us up a garden one), and therefore two further motives for her book are conceivable: one is that this ...

AmeriKKKa

Thomas Sugrue: Civil Rights v. Black Power, 5 October 2006

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Oxford, 690 pp., £19.99, March 2006, 0 19 513674 8
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... was supposedly un-American in its embrace of Third World Marxism, its call for armed black self-defence, its celebration of a separate, distinctive black culture, and its call for ‘offing the pigs’ and overthrowing white supremacist ‘AmeriKKKa’. In this version of civil rights history, angry black militants alienated the very whites who they ...

Be flippant

David Edgar: Noël Coward’s Return, 9 December 1999

1956 and All That 
by Dan Reballato.
Routledge, 265 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 415 18938 1
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Collected Plays: Six 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 415 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73410 2
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Collected Plays: Seven 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 381 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73410 2
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Collected Revue Sketches and Parodies 
by Noël Coward.
Methuen, 282 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 413 73390 4
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Noël Coward: A Life in Quotes 
edited by Barry Day.
Metro, 116 pp., £9.99, November 1999, 9781900512848
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Noël Coward: The Complete Lyrics 
Methuen, 352 pp., £30, December 1998, 0 413 73230 4Show More
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... revolution has a photograph of Blithe Spirit on the cover. Mindful of Coward’s 1961 plea to the self-expressive young playwrights of the Royal Court school to ‘consider the public’, Rebellato charts the ways in which the post-’56 Court disempowered the audience, from the abolition of the writer’s curtain call (at which the audience could boo) to the ...

Dream On

Katha Pollitt: Bringing up Babies, 11 September 2003

I Don't Know How She Does It 
by Allison Pearson.
Vintage, 256 pp., £6.99, May 2003, 0 09 942838 5
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A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother 
by Rachel Cusk.
Fourth Estate, 224 pp., £6.99, July 2002, 1 84115 487 3
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The Truth about Babies: From A-Z 
by Ian Sansom.
Granta, 352 pp., £6.99, June 2003, 1 86207 575 1
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What Are Children For? 
by Laurie Taylor and Matthew Taylor.
Short Books, 141 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 1 904095 25 9
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The Commercialisation of Intimate Life 
by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
California, 313 pp., £32.95, May 2003, 0 520 21487 0
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... structured to suit men, preferably men with stay-at-home wives. The qualities rewarded there – self-reliance, ambition, single-minded devotion to work – make women unfit for marriage and vice versa. By the time they are ready to settle down, their male contemporaries are married or looking for younger, softer women; if it’s not too late for a ...

A Bear Armed with a Gun

David Runciman: The Widening Atlantic, 3 April 2003

Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order 
by Robert Kagan.
Atlantic, 104 pp., £10, March 2003, 1 84354 177 7
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... and which he reiterates throughout the book. Europeans are now Kantians, seeking to inhabit ‘a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation’. The United States, by contrast, ‘remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable’. He goes on ...

A Plan and a Man

Neal Ascherson: Remembering Malaya, 20 February 2014

Massacre in Malaya: Exposing Britain’s My Lai 
by Christopher Hale.
History Press, 432 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 7524 8701 4
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... Colonial Office knew that a stable ‘Malayan’ nation could not be created and brought towards self-government while the enormous Chinese immigrant population was excluded from citizenship – treated as if it did not exist. And yet they themselves shared much of the anti-Chinese prejudice. The British entered South-East Asia in the wake of the Portuguese ...

No more alimony, tra la la

Miranda Carter: Somerset Maugham, 17 December 2009

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham 
by Selina Hastings.
John Murray, 614 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 7195 6554 0
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... Isherwood.) In contrast to his reserve in company, however, Maugham was addicted in his writing to self-disclosure: ‘Most of what one writes is to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical.’ Though his narrative persona was cynical and detached, his books were filled with accounts of his own miserable experiences of childhood, love and marriage; as well ...

Who were they?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Thuggee’, 3 December 2009

Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of ‘Thuggee’ 
edited by Kim Wagner.
Oxford, 318 pp., £22.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 569815 2
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... extremely vague, even in the so-called Act XXX of 1836. The campaign was also an opportunity for self-aggrandisement on the part of some Company officials, most conspicuously Sleeman, who published the so-called ‘standard work on thuggee’, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs (1836). According to a report he wrote in May ...

Am I a spaceman?

Adam Phillips: Wilhelm Reich, 20 October 2011

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex 
by Christopher Turner.
Fourth Estate, 532 pp., £25, August 2011, 978 0 00 718157 5
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... nostalgia on the early days of psychoanalysis. ‘When we scrutinise the personalities who, by self-selection, became the first generation of psychoanalysts,’ she said, we are left in no doubt about their characteristics. They were the unconventional ones, the doubters, those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge; also among ...

The First Career Politician

James Romm: Demosthenes, 20 June 2013

Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece 
by Ian Worthington.
Oxford, 382 pp., £22.50, January 2012, 978 0 19 993195 8
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... but liberally rewarded. His own speeches and the letters attributed to him are so laden with self-promotion and so rhetorically wrought as to leave their author’s real personality and intentions in question. Historians have been sharply divided in their assessments of Demosthenes, some seeing him as a consummate politician who never uttered a sentence ...

I dive under the covers

Sheila Heti: Mad Wives, 6 June 2013

Heroines 
by Kate Zambreno.
Semiotext(e), 309 pp., £12.95, November 2012, 978 1 58435 114 6
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... creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ‘training to be a psychoanalyst, and I will become a feminist analyst to tortured, eccentric artists.’ This would be her ...

Money Man

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in Company, 6 February 2014

Shakespeare in Company 
by Bart van Es.
Oxford, 357 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 19 956931 1
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... might well have regarded with disdain. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the self-consciously classical narrative poems he published in 1593 and 1594, with their dutifully obsequious dedications to Southampton, were what mattered to him, rather than Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and the early history plays, which he made no ...

Cite ourselves!

Richard J. Evans: The Annales School, 3 December 2009

The Annales School: An Intellectual History 
by André Burguière, translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Cornell, 309 pp., £24.95, 0 8014 4665 1
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... of the war and the reconstruction of French academic life and institutions, Febvre got his chance. Self-publicising was part of the plan. ‘Cite ourselves,’ he commanded around 1950, ‘don’t lose the opportunity to cite ourselves, to propagate what is essential, that is to say, our keywords. The threefold division of Braudel: milieu, collective ...

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