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Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ‘chosen freedom’ but rather, for the most part, involuntary wartime border-crossers, many of whom had then made the best of their situation by ...

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
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... that charmed him, its combination of photographic realism and fantastic effect, or what Walter Benjamin called the ‘blue flower’ of sensuous immediacy produced through intensive mediation. As a child, Magritte contrived plays and pranks with a gang that included his two younger brothers and assorted neighbourhood pals, and he made home movies for much ...

Not a Tough Crowd

Christian Lorentzen: Among the Democrats, 12 September 2024

... riding the bus to school as ‘part of a national experiment in desegregation, with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other’; the move to Montreal in middle school when her mother was hired at McGill; her decision to return to the US to attend Howard ...

Jews on horseback

Peter Clarke, 10 May 1990

Disraeli 
by John Vincent.
Oxford, 127 pp., £4.95, March 1990, 0 19 287681 3
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... the politics as a deflationary corrective to literary licence. It is rightly a study of the writer Benjamin Disraeli rather than the statesman, the Earl of Beaconsfield. He had a distinctively literary sensibility: this was the medium in which his imagination reached out. His oratory was really spoken prose; it had the smell of ink and midnight oil. His ...

Covid-19 in the Time of Netanyahu

Yonatan Mendel: Bibi has done it again, 7 May 2020

... Benjamin​ Netanyahu’s trial for corruption was supposed to begin on 17 March. He had been charged on three separate counts: the first indictment, for fraud and breach of trust, has to do with the alleged receipt of ‘gifts’ – cigars, champagne – with a total value of $200,000 from the Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan and the Australian billionaire James Packer ...

Devils Everywhere

David Wootton: The Terrors of the Night, 9 March 2006

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime 
by Roger Ekirch.
Weidenfeld, 447 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 297 82992 0
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Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward 
by David Prerau.
Granta, 256 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 1 86207 796 7
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... become acquainted with shades and degrees of dark of which I was previously unaware, from pitch black to the bright light of the full moon, and acquainted, too, with the noises of the night, the barking of foxes, the hooting of owls, the cracking of the fire, the stirring of the sleeping dogs, the sound of rainfall (particularly loud on the roof of a ...

Feeling feeling

Brian Dillon: Sense of Self, 5 June 2008

The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 386 pp., £21.95, June 2007, 978 1 890951 76 4
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... century, this clarity belongs to the philosophers who identified the ‘poverty of experience’ (Benjamin), ‘deep boredom’ (Heidegger) and ‘experience of depersonalisation’ (Lévinas) that characterise modern life. The inner touch has been withdrawn; hence ‘the unfeeling faces and bodies that fill our screens, our books, and our newspapers with ...

Fill it with fish

Helen Cooper: The trail of the Grail, 6 June 2002

Parzival and the Stone from Heaven: A Grail Romance Retold for Our Time 
by Lindsay Clarke.
HarperCollins, 239 pp., £14.99, September 2001, 0 00 710813 3
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Merlin and the Grail: ‘Joseph of Arimathea’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Perceval’ The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances Attributed to Robert de Boron 
translated by Nigel Bryant.
Boydell and Brewer, 172 pp., £30, May 2001, 0 85991 616 2
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Le Livre du Graal. Tome I: ‘Joseph D’Arimathie’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Les Premiers Faits du Roi Arthur’ 
edited by Daniel Poirion and Philippe Walter.
Gallimard, 1993 pp., £50.95, April 2001, 2 07 011342 6
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... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...

Grateful Dead

John Barrell, 22 April 1993

The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 790 pp., £80, January 1993, 0 19 865211 9
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... who sought to molest him. He rode round town on a white pony, painted sometimes with purple and black spots, sometimes purple all over. Butchell was an empiric who specialised in curing anal fistulae without surgery or the use of caustics or poultices; he also claimed to be able to cure impotence in men and barrenness in women. He displayed the embalmed ...

Southern Discomfort

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 8 June 1995

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism 
by Eugene Genovese.
Harvard, 138 pp., £17.95, October 1994, 0 674 82527 6
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... other ruling classes in modern times’. These were not welcome ideas in the time of Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. No less significant was Genovese’s prize-winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), a sophisticated, psychologically sensitive and comprehensive social history that remains a classic. Masters and slaves, he ...

Italianizzati

Hugh Honour, 13 November 1997

A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 
compiled by John Ingamells.
Yale, 1070 pp., £50, May 1997, 0 300 07165 5
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... successful careers than the great majority of those who did. The idea spread across the Atlantic, Benjamin West being the first American artist to make the pilgrimage to Italy, sponsored by Philadelphian patrons. He spent three years there before going to England, where he decided to stay instead of returning to America. But artists did not go to Italy only ...

Tang and Tone

Stephen Fender: The Federal Writer’s Project’s American epic, 18 March 2004

Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project 
by Jerrold Hirsch.
North Carolina, 293 pp., £16.50, November 2003, 0 8078 5489 1
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... streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the ...

How Shall We Repaint the Kitchen?

Ian Hacking: The Colour Red, 1 November 2007

Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind 
by G.E.R. Lloyd.
Oxford, 201 pp., £27.50, April 2007, 978 0 19 921461 7
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... Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from ...

How good is it?

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Inside the KJB, 3 February 2011

The Holy Bible: King James Version, 1611 Text 
edited by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 1552 pp., £50, October 2010, 978 0 19 955760 8
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Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611-2011 
by Gordon Campbell.
Oxford, 354 pp., £16.99, October 2010, 978 0 19 955759 2
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The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today 
by David Norton.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 521 61688 1
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The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences 
edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones.
Cambridge, 364 pp., £25, December 2010, 978 0 521 76827 6
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Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language 
by David Crystal.
Oxford, 327 pp., £14.99, September 2010, 978 0 19 958585 4
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... two centuries later, and indeed Gordon Campbell comes clean in his appended essay. The Gothic or black-letter type of the original is thought to be too difficult to read easily, even for the sort of people who would enjoy such a volume. That has an unfortunate side effect common to any modern edition of the KJB which keeps the original convention of ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... 1564, are the words hic incepit pestis: ‘Here begins the plague.’ ‘God’s tokens’, the black or purplish spots that were a telltale sign of bubonic plague, had presumably been found on Gunne’s body. Over the previous six months, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church had registered a score of burials; in a town of just under 1500 inhabitants, that was ...

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