Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 42 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

State of Exception 
by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell.
Chicago, 104 pp., £8.50, January 2005, 0 226 00925 4
Show More
Show More
... The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and, unlike like most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to forego an academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. What is at stake, he explains, is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state ...

Squeegee Abstracts

Malcolm Bull: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic, 10 August 2023

Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History 
by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
MIT, 661 pp., £40, September 2022, 978 0 262 54353 8
Show More
Show More
... One​ way to get a perspective on the contemporary art world is to look at two databases, Artprice and Artfacts, which provide rankings of artists based on saleroom prices and exhibition exposure respectively. When I first did this more than ten years ago, the artist who came out on top, outperforming all other living artists when the rankings were combined, was Gerhard Richter ...

Anybody’s

Malcolm Bull, 23 March 1995

Nicolas Poussin, 1594-1665 
by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat.
Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 560 pp., frs 350, September 1994, 2 7118 3027 6
Show More
Nicolas Poussin 
by Anthony Blunt.
Pallas Athene, 690 pp., £24.95, January 1995, 1 873429 64 9
Show More
Nicolas Poussin 1594-1665 
by Richard Verdi, with an essay by Pierre Rosenberg.
Zwemmer, 336 pp., £39.50, January 1995, 0 302 00647 8
Show More
Roma 1630: Il trionfo del pennello 
edited by Olivier Bonfait.
Electa, 260 pp., July 1994, 88 435 5047 0
Show More
Poussin before Rome 1594-1624 
by Jacques Thuillier.
Feigen, 119 pp., £40, January 1995, 1 873232 03 9
Show More
The Expression of the Passions 
by Jennifer Montagu.
Yale, 256 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 300 05891 8
Show More
L’Ecole du silence 
by Marc Fumaroli.
Flammarion, 512 pp., frs 295, May 1994, 2 08 012618 0
Show More
To Destroy Painting 
by Louis Marin, translated by Mette Hjort.
Chicago, 196 pp., £31.95, April 1995, 0 226 50535 9
Show More
Show More
... They want him back. They always have, but now they want him more than ever: living in Rome for almost his entire career was one thing, posthumous residence in England is another. That the artist ‘qui incame le XVIIe siècle français’ should have become (as Olivier Bonfait’s essay in the Paris catalogue describes him) ‘un objet totalement “anglo-saxon” ’ is seen as a source of national shame ...

Oedipus was innocent

Malcolm Bull, 10 March 1994

Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith 
by Norman Cohn.
Yale, 271 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 300 05598 6
Show More
Show More
... During the high tide of theory in the early Eighties, René Girard was the critic who received most honour in his own country and least in the Anglo-Saxon world. As early as 1981, the year before the publication of Le Bouc émissaire (The Scapegoat), his most accessible book, Girard, a professor at Stanford, was at number 14 in the magazine Lire’s hitparade of French intellectuals, while Derrida and Baudrillard were not even in the top 40 ...

Tick-Tock

Malcolm Bull: Three Cheers for Apocalypse, 9 December 1999

Conversations about the End of Time 
by Umberto Eco and Stephen Jay Gould.
Allen Lane, 228 pp., £14.99, September 1999, 0 7139 9363 4
Show More
Apocalypses: Prophesies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs throughout the Ages 
by Eugen Weber.
Hutchinson, 294 pp., £18.99, July 1999, 0 09 180134 6
Show More
Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium 
by Richard Popkin and David Katz.
Allen Lane, 303 pp., £18.99, October 1999, 0 7139 9383 9
Show More
Show More
... It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K ...

Ultimate Choice

Malcolm Bull: Thoughts of Genocide, 9 February 2006

The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing 
by Michael Mann.
Cambridge, 580 pp., £17.99, January 2005, 0 521 53854 8
Show More
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. Vol. I: The Meaning of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 266 pp., £24.50, August 2005, 1 85043 752 1
Show More
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Vol. II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 463 pp., £29.50, August 2005, 1 84511 057 9
Show More
Show More
... Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the difficult and protracted business of getting into a position in which I could expect others to obey my orders ...

What is the rational response?

Malcolm Bull: Climate Change Ethics, 24 May 2012

A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change 
by Stephen Gardiner.
Oxford, 512 pp., £22.50, July 2011, 978 0 19 537944 0
Show More
Show More
... For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with rising temperatures, while natural causes of global warming have remained constant ...

You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife

Malcolm Bull: Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 4 October 2001

Empire 
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Harvard, 478 pp., £12.95, August 2001, 0 674 00671 2
Show More
Show More
... Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the ‘anarchists’. Damaging property and street fighting proved the most effective forms of protest, and provoked an over-reaction from the police: they shot a man armed with a fire extinguisher and raided the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum for no reason ...

Does marmalade exist?

Terry Eagleton, 27 January 2022

The Concept of the Social: Scepticism, Idleness and Utopia 
by Malcolm Bull.
Verso, 243 pp., £16.99, October 2021, 978 1 84467 293 6
Show More
Show More
... You never know​ what Malcolm Bull will come up with next. He is the least predictable of authors, as well as one of the most versatile. What other political theorist can write about Zoroastrianism, the Book of Enoch, medieval prophecy, the perception of colour, animal magnetism and the politics of sleep? There is scarcely a major philosopher from Heraclitus to Martha Nussbaum whose work Bull hasn’t made inventive use of, though Freud is a curious absence ...

Looking at the Ceiling

T.J. Clark: A Savonarolan Bonfire, 22 September 2005

The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art 
by Malcolm Bull.
Allen Lane, 465 pp., £30, April 2005, 9780713992007
Show More
Show More
... Malcolm Bull has written a formidable handbook, for which, I predict, many scholars and lovers of Renaissance art will never forgive him. What he has to say in the end about the revival of the ancient gods in early modern Europe amounts to a wholesale (Savonarolan) bonfire of most art historians’ assumptions, or wishes, about the leaven of paganism in the transition to modernity ...

Looking back at the rubble

David Simpson: War and the Built Environment, 25 May 2006

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War 
by Robert Bevan.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £19.95, January 2006, 1 86189 205 5
Show More
Show More
... only to those not on the receiving end, and often operating apparently on the wrong patients. Malcolm Bull has recently explored the slippery implications and latent paradoxes of genocide and its definitions: that it might be more likely to be perpetrated by democracies, for example, and thus can be construed as a symptom of democracy’s bad ...

Not Window, Not Wall

Hal Foster: Farewell to Modernism?, 1 December 2022

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present 
by T.J. Clark.
Thames and Hudson, 239 pp., £30, August 2022, 978 0 500 02528 4
Show More
Show More
... could also be understood. Clark once called the young Greenberg an ‘Eliotic Trotskyite’, and Malcolm Bull referred to the Clark of Farewell to an Idea, also oxymoronically, as a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’. Neither term applies to this book, but an equally contradictory formulation is needed. If These Apples Should Fall follows Farewell to an ...

There isn’t any inside!

Adam Mars-Jones: William Gaddis, 23 September 2021

The Recognitions 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 992 pp., £24, November 2020, 978 1 68137 466 6
Show More
JR 
by William Gaddis.
NYRB, 784 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 68137 468 0
Show More
Show More
... in the shadow of Mount Lamentation. He arrives more or less insane and carrying a gold figure of a bull. His father now worships Mithras, and there’s a bull in the carriage barn, so it’s a good choice of offering (earlier the barn’s occupant was a Barbary ape called Heracles, disembowelled and crucified by the reverend ...

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
Show More
Show More
... leading public officials, including the Birmingham public safety commissioner, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, who ordered the police to withdraw from the station minutes before the Riders arrived. A few days later, when the Riders, bandaged and nervous, moved on to Montgomery, Alabama’s capitol, they once again faced violence. At the Montgomery bus ...

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8
Show More
Show More
... double involves extensive whipping of Lumb’s bald head and the sacrifice of an enormous white bull. The scene combines the lineaments of a modern torture chamber – a windowless room, a concrete floor, unnamed men wielding whips ‘hard and heavy as a lump of wire cable’ and brandishing electrified clubs – with the arcane rituals of a primitive ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences