Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... machine in Scotland. No longer. When large numbers stop believing that they can exercise political self-determination within the existing social order they begin to look beyond traditional governing parties. On the Continent (and in England) this has led to the growth of the right. In Scotland what is being demanded is national, social and political ...”

Too Many Alibis

James Wood: Geoffrey Hill, 1 July 1999

Canaan 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 76 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 14 058786 1Show More
The Truth of Love: A Poem 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 82 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 0 14 058910 4Show More
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“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

Secret Purposes

P.N. Furbank, 19 September 1985

Defoe and the Idea of Fiction: 1713-1719 
by Geoffrey Sill.
Associated University Presses, 190 pp., £16.95, April 1984, 0 87413 227 4Show More
The Elusive Daniel Defoe 
by Laura Curtis.
Vision, 216 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 85478 435 7Show More
Dofoe’s Fiction 
by Ian Bell.
Croom Helm, 201 pp., £17.95, March 1985, 0 7099 3294 4Show More
Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction 
by Maximillian Novak.
Nebraska, 181 pp., £21.55, July 1983, 0 8032 3307 8Show More
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“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”

Joan Didion’s Style

Martin Amis, 7 February 1980

The White Album 
by Joan Didion.
Weidenfeld, 223 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77702 5Show More
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“... the neurologist concluded: ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem Miss Didion admitted: ‘whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say, after 200 pages of these high-profile musings, that ...”

My god wears a durag

Ian Penman: Better than Beyoncé, 6 January 2022

Why Solange Matters 
by Stephanie Phillips.
Faber, 256 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 0 571 36898 3Show More
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“... space to learn to love what I describe in various ways throughout the book as my Black girl weirdo self,’ Phillips writes. Another way in which Solange matters: her excursions into art and literacy and fashion have her speaking in a different way, in different places, to new audiences. Her now frequent art-world projects make her a kind of Bowie figure for ...”

Creamy Polished Globes

Blake Morrison: A.E. Coppard’s Stories, 7 July 2022

The Hurly Burly and Other Stories 
by A.E. Coppard, edited by Russell Banks.
Ecco, 320 pp., £16.99, March 2021, 978 0 06 305416 5Show More
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“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

Gravity’s Smoothest Dream

Matthew Bevis: A.R. Ammons, 7 March 2019

The Complete Poems 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, two vols, 2133 pp., £74, December 2017, 978 0 393 25489 1Show More
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“... threatens to live a shadow life as a gerund. Ammons’s early work is sometimes enervated by a self-watchfulness that borders on mannerism; his desire for a life ‘chilled in the attitude of song’ can lead to a sort of pinched imperviousness. When starting out, he proudly explained to an editor that ‘this slight indifference, unwillingness to be ...”

Thee, Thou, Twixt

Mark Ford: Walter de la Mare, 24 March 2022

Reading Walter de la Mare 
edited by William Wootten.
Faber, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 0 571 34713 1Show More
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“... plastic individual truth immerged in beauty: whereas the scrap of science is for the time being a self-contained announcement of what is an ascertained fact – universally provable by those intelligent enough to comprehend it. You can’t prove a poem; it proves you.Although an early sonnet called ‘The Happy Encounter’ depicts Science as a ...”

Puffed Wheat

James Wood: How serious is John Bayley?, 20 October 2005

The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002 
by John Bayley, selected by Leo Carey.
Duckworth, 677 pp., £25, March 2005, 0 7156 3312 0Show More
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“... about solipsism in Tolstoy’s world, ‘the simpleness and naturalness of the great open world of self-conceit which Tolstoy knew so well, the world of War and Peace in which solipsism is in reasonable accord with mutuality’. It is War and Peace, with its epic naturalness and its indebtedness to Pushkinian ‘lightness’ that clearly absorbs Bayley, much ...”

What’s left of Henrietta Lacks?

Anne Enright: HeLa, 13 April 2000

“... but the question of intention must be a false one. Under the microscope, the question of ‘self’ is so diffuse and so complicated that it might as well not arise. This is all unlucky talk. I am pregnant for the first time, the bump just beginning to show. I don’t know what my pregnant self is, either. The ...”

Fly in the Soup

Paul Henley: Anthropology and cinema, 21 June 2001

Anthropologie et cinéma: Passage à l'image, passage par l'image 
by Marc Henri Piault.
Nathan, frs 139, April 2000, 2 09 190790 1Show More
Transcultural Cinema 
by David MacDougall.
Princeton, 328 pp., £11.95, December 1998, 0 691 01234 2Show More
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“... a voice-over commentary. This is quite different, however, from the documentary form originated by Robert Flaherty in the 1920s and which is still employed in a large proportion of the films labelled as ‘ethnographic’. In these, a group of characters are followed through a series of activities arranged according to the dramaturgical requirements of a ...”

A Turk, a Turk, a Turk

Christopher Tayler: Orhan Pamuk, 5 August 2004

Snow 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 436 pp., £12.99, May 2004, 0 571 22065 7Show More
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“... bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator – becomes obsessed with the mysteries of European self-fashioning. Over the course of several years, he and the narrator study one another, gazing into mirrors and writing answers to the question ‘Why am I what I am?’ Hoja decides that the Franks’ successes derive from their greater capacity for ...”

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1Show More
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“... in a very feminine way and loaf with the other sissies.’ In art school, when asked to make a self-portrait, he depicted himself as a girl ‘with Shirley Temple ringlets’. Pittsburgh was not a good place to be gay. In 1948 the police set up a Morals Squad with a mission ‘to arrest gay men’. In 1951, ‘Pennsylvania’s maximum sentence for sodomy ...”

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4Show More
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“... would become legendary (the best account is given by Adrienne Rich). And although she never self-identified as Jewish, being Jewish is something with which she was always identified. As Ettinger puts it, ‘she represented a nation the Germans considered inferior and a race that offended their sensibilities.’ None of that was altered – in many ways ...”

Something good

H. Stuart Hughes, 13 September 1990

All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943 
by Jonathan Steinberg.
Routledge, 320 pp., £20, June 1990, 0 415 04757 9Show More
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“... go into detail: it is Steinberg’s task to elaborate. A curious mix of ‘prestige, humanity and self-interest’, he finds, ‘fused in the Italian determination’ not to go along. Perhaps primarily ‘it had become a matter of ... honour ... the last shred of honour left’ in a war Italy was losing. And, most curiously, this resistance ‘was carried out ...”
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