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Daniel Soar: The Arts Council, 7 February 2008

... pieces, made to measure for each performer.’ These are not, then, your regular factory-produced bell jars, which any old thespian can prance about in, but art objects in themselves and therefore worthy of public funding. ‘Under Glass,’ the Clod Ensemble say, ‘is an exploration of how we can live within our limits.’ It’s hard not to feel that this ...

Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics 
by Arpad Kadarkay.
Blackwell, 538 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 55786 114 5
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... of ‘historical forces’. ‘The shabbiest and most humiliating years of his life’, Daniel Bell has called Lukács’s years – 1930-45 – in the Soviet Union. Lukács himself called them ‘the most harmonious’ – they were certainly the years of his most sustained propaganda on behalf of Leninism and Stalinism. He achieved the ...

Enlightenment’s Errand Boy

David A. Bell: The Philosophes and the Republic of Letters, 22 May 2003

Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in 18th-Century France 
by L.W.B. Brockliss.
Oxford, 471 pp., £55, July 2002, 9780199247486
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The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 
by Colin Jones.
Allen Lane, 651 pp., £25, August 2002, 0 7139 9039 2
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... new one) have repeated them to new generations of readers, while literary historians such as Daniel Mornet have taken them for granted and proceeded to tell the story of the Enlightenment’s steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
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... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...

The Atheists’ Picnic

Julian Bell: Art and Its Origins, 10 June 2010

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion 
by David Lewis-Williams.
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., £18.95, March 2010, 978 0 500 05164 1
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... up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a ...

Get out

Julian Bell: Francis Bacon, 19 October 2000

Looking back at Francis Bacon 
by David Sylvester.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 500 01994 0
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... ground down to prose, the apocalyptics have come to seem a little quaint. A year after his death, Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently ...

Twilight Approaches

David A. Bell: Salon Life in France, 11 May 2006

The Age of Conversation 
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh.
NYRB, 488 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 1 59017 141 1
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... and the voluminous historical writing on the subject as well. She pays the American scholar Daniel Gordon, author of an important study of Enlightenment ideas of sociability, the compliment of following him so closely as to lapse, on occasion, into paraphrase. And yet, time and again, the entrancing fable dances away with her like a seducer at a ...

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 4
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The Elusive Daniel Defoe 
by Laura Curtis.
Vision, 216 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 85478 435 7
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Dofoe’s Fiction 
by Ian Bell.
Croom Helm, 201 pp., £17.95, March 1985, 0 7099 3294 4
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Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction 
by Maximillian Novak.
Nebraska, 181 pp., £21.55, July 1983, 0 8032 3307 8
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... Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to the ideal world implied in the prose and attitudes of the plain-speaking Mr Review, in Defoe’s journal The Review. In the former, as in the latter, all the emphasis is ...

Nightwork in Chengdu

Kenneth Pomeranz: China’s Capitalism, 18 February 2016

China’s Growth: The Making of an Economic Superpower 
by Linda Yueh.
Oxford, 349 pp., £29.99, April 2013, 978 0 19 920578 3
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The Rise of the People’s Bank of China: The Politics of Institutional Change 
by Stephen Bell and Hui Feng.
Harvard, 374 pp., £40.95, June 2013, 978 0 674 07249 7
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The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China 
by You-tien Hsing.
Oxford, 272 pp., £27.50, March 2012, 978 0 19 964459 9
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Constructing China’s Capitalism: Shanghai and the Nexus of Urban-Rural Industries 
by Daniel Buck.
Macmillan, 267 pp., £55, July 2012, 978 0 230 34095 4
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Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich 
by John Osburg.
Stanford, 248 pp., £15.99, April 2013, 978 0 8047 8354 5
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... it in her story. The Rise of the People’s Bank of China, by the political scientists Stephen Bell and Hui Feng, looks at how institutional change happens in a society with no place for overt political competition. It also conveys far greater anxiety than Yueh’s book about the urgent need for rapid change. At the end of their book, ...

Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... the things they really think. They don’t always signify, but sometimes they do: ‘One in The Bell before quiz’, ‘hideous racket, thought they could sell the old barn’, ‘what next Polish adverts in the parish mag’. Porter has explained in interviews that he imagined these snatches of village talk would have run along the bottom like an endless ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
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The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
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... Greene had stood on an underground platform contemplating suicide, the US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell ruled in favour of the forced sterilisation of ‘mental defectives’, including epileptics. ‘It is better for all the world,’ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote, ‘if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them ...

An American Genius

Patrick Parrinder, 21 November 1991

The Runaway Soul 
by Harold Brodkey.
Cape, 835 pp., £15.99, November 1991, 0 224 03001 9
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... detailed accounts of his relations with two girlfriends, Ora and Leonie, and two boyfriends, Daniel and Remsen (the novel is staunchly bisexual), who obviously do like him, and frequently tell him so, no matter how boorishly and obnoxiously he behaves toward them. Nor is he any slouch at self-love, for he is both a compulsive masturbator and an epic ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Marlene Dietrich, 17 December 2020

... can no longer read his fortune: ‘Your future’s all used up.’ The writer in the first case is Daniel Taradash, in the second Orson Welles. She is the urban exception in the wild country, the elaborately dressed lady with the fancy hairdo who knows more about life than any of the cowboys or prospectors. She is indispensable, if not to the West then ...

Poor Devils

Peter France, 2 December 1982

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime 
by Robert Darnton.
Harvard, 258 pp., £11.55, November 1982, 0 674 53656 8
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... good taste and witty conversation, a haven of the ‘civilisation’ celebrated long ago by Clive Bell. But at the same time the dynamic new France, in which great thinkers shake the foundations of traditional society and prepare the way for the Revolution and the modern age – such is the view propagated in different guises by the French republican ...

Ravish Me

Daniel Soar: Sebastian Faulks, 5 November 2009

A Week in December 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 518 pp., £18.99, September 2009, 978 0 09 179445 3
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... English that’s reminiscent of Hemingway’s way of suggesting spoken Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with all his ‘thous’ and ‘thees’. Everything is exactly described and faultlessly detailed, just as it is in the novels that precede and follow it, The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and Charlotte Gray (1998), which extend the territory of ...

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