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Time, Gentlemen, Please

David Cannadine, 19 July 1984

The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 
by Stephen Kern.
Weidenfeld, 372 pp., £16.50, October 1983, 0 297 78341 6
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Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World 
by David Landes.
Harvard, 482 pp., £17, January 1984, 0 674 76800 0
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... In a characteristically versatile display of cultural, technological and economic history, David Landes looks at the evolution of the clock as a machine, and at the triumph of public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and ...

‘His eyes were literally on fire’

David Trotter: Fu Manchu, 5 March 2015

The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia 
by Christopher Frayling.
Thames and Hudson, 360 pp., £24.95, October 2014, 978 0 500 25207 9
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... Dickens and Richard Horne wrote a piece for Household Words that contrasted the wonders of the Crystal Palace with the quaintness of an accompanying display of artefacts from China at a gallery in Hyde Park Place. ‘It is very curious,’ Dickens and Horne noted, ‘to have the Exhibition of a people who came to a dead stop, Heaven knows how many hundreds ...

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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... the style of Mills and Boon. A noble home is ‘illuminated by a thousand candles, shimmering with crystal and silver, and teeming with the full flower of the French nobility’. Mlle d’Epernon had ‘a tender, chaste love’ for the Chevalier de Fiesque, while ‘no one had a happier youth than Mlle de Bourbon.’ Noblemen are generally ...

Convenience Killing

John Sutherland, 7 April 1994

What’s Wrong with America 
by Scott Bradfield.
Picador, 196 pp., £14.99, January 1994, 0 330 32249 4
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The History of Luminous Motion 
by Scott Bradfield.
Picador, 196 pp., £5.99, January 1994, 0 330 33412 3
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Greetings from Earth 
by Scott Bradfield.
Picador, 296 pp., £5.99, January 1994, 0 330 32252 4
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... of liquid protein, wheat germ, vitamin B complex and B12 and three heaped tablespoons of blue crystal Drano.’ Daniel dies making gurgling noises like bad plumbing; rather appropriate in the circumstances. And so Dolores goes on, slashing the throat of a loved one with a kitchen knife, shooting the man who eventually marries her and burying him in the ...

Diary

David Craig: Moore in Prato, 9 December 1999

... from a thousand planes like shot off armour. It’s as though we’re balanced on a titanic crystal that climbs as high as the sun. Cut blocks rest here and there, one with a diamond-shod steel cord tensed motionless a quarter of the way through the stone. ‘They are trimming off poor-quality rock,’ says Carlo while Ron translates. On the lip of the ...

You know who

Jasper Rees, 4 August 1994

Jim Henson – The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination 
by Christopher Finch.
Aurum, 251 pp., £20, April 1994, 1 85410 296 6
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... films not involving the Muppets fed on fantastical, picaresque literary sources: The Dark Crystal on Tolkien, Labyrinth on Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film ...

Six hands at an open door

David Trotter, 21 March 1991

Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot 
by Dennis Brown.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £35, November 1990, 9780333516461
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An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 205 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 233 98639 1
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... of Rip Van Winkle, that the challenge laid down by Canto CXVI (‘I have brought the great ball of crystal;/ who can lift it?/ Can you enter the great acorn of light?’) has never been met. ‘Nothing in English creative writing or criticism since those words were written in the late Fifties really seems an adequate response, except perhaps the via negativa ...

At the Barbican

John-Paul Stonard: ‘Postwar Modern’, 23 June 2022

... condition’ and simply delighting us with its colour and substance, like an eye-catching dessert. David Sylvester described looking at a painting by Auerbach at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956 as like ‘running our fingertips over the contours of a head near us in the dark, reassured by its presence, disturbed by its otherness’.By including the work of so ...

Broadcasting and the Abyss

Norman Buchan, 14 June 1990

... fought around that phrase, and the whole question of quality. And something was won. The Minister, David Mellor, accepted that ‘exceptional circumstances’ could include quality. This he has now spelled out in the Bill. But it still leaves much unanswered. Little is laid down in relation to ensuring diversity. The customary reference to the broadcaster’s ...

Exhibitionists

Hal Foster: Curation, 4 June 2015

Ways of Curating 
by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Penguin, 192 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 241 95096 8
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Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World – And Everything Else 
by David Balzer.
Pluto, 140 pp., £8.99, April 2015, 978 0 7453 3597 1
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... formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about ‘how curating took over the art world – and everything else’. But both do point out how far we have come from the original avatars of the term (whose root is cura or ‘care’): the curatores, the civil servants who ...

Hippopotamus charges train

David Trotter: Rediscovering Gertrude Trevelyan, 29 June 2023

Two Thousand Million Man-Power 
by Gertrude Trevelyan.
Boiler House Press, 297 pp., £14.99, November 2022, 978 1 913861 85 8
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... a piece for Household Words that pits the scientific and technological wonders on show at the Crystal Palace against the quaintness of an accompanying display of artefacts from China. Dickens and Horne identified modernity with the circulation of goods and people. Colvin put the emphasis on the labour saved by machines. Trevelyan’s novel of ideas could ...

Gloomy Sunday Afternoons

Caroline Maclean: Modernists at the Movies, 10 September 2009

The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period 
by Laura Marcus.
Oxford, 562 pp., £39, December 2007, 978 0 19 923027 3
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... images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of ...

Follow the Money

David Conn, 30 August 2012

... have been the result of relegation from the Premier League. Leeds, Leicester City, Bradford City, Crystal Palace and Wimbledon have all gone into administration that way. Portsmouth was the first club to suffer insolvency while still in the Premier League. In February 2010, with debts of more than £100 million, it was put into administration by Balram ...

Hoo-Hooing in the Birch

Michael Hofmann: Tomas Tranströmer, 16 June 2016

Bright Scythe: Selected Poems 
by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Patty Crane.
Sarabande, 207 pp., £13, November 2015, 978 1 941411 21 6
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... a neologism, an ordinary word) as ‘glass-clear’ when English says ‘crystal clear’. One language assonates, the other alliterates. (The sentence it occurs in, the first sentence in the first poem in the book, makes a horrid screech anyway in a bafflingly disordered English: ‘The stones we have thrown I hear/fall, glass-clear ...

When Pigs Ruled the Earth

James Secord: A prehistoric apocalypse, 1 April 2004

When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time 
by Michael Benton.
Thames and Hudson, 336 pp., £16.95, March 2003, 9780500051160
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... also still be seen in the extraordinary models of extinct monsters built for the grounds of the Crystal Palace when it moved to Sydenham in 1854. Here, iguanodon and other giant dinosaurs, made out of bricks, iron and cement, appear as the lords of reptilian creation. More than a million visitors a year saw these displays in the 19th century, and they ...

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