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Mattathias Schwartz: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness, 16 July 2020

... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...

Blues of Many Skies

Joyce Chaplin: Alexander von Humboldt, 21 February 2019

Selected Writings 
by Alexander Von Humboldt, edited by Andrea Wulf.
Everyman, 840 pp., £15, November 2018, 978 1 84159 387 6
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... revolutions associated with Simón Bolívar broke out after 1811, he worried that without strong ties to Spain the educated elite in colonial societies would be too small to foster the civilised society he prized. Political independence was not, as he saw it, a valid goal, particularly in places where non-Europeans were likely to outnumber creole ...

Warp Speed

Frank Close: Gravitational Waves, 7 February 2008

Travelling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves 
by Daniel Kennefick.
Princeton, 319 pp., £19.95, May 2007, 978 0 691 11727 0
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... to concede. The question now became: what causes the secular acceleration of the Moon? Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered in 1776 that orbits would eventually degrade if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the ...

At the Helm of the World

Pankaj Mishra: Alexander Herzen, 1 June 2017

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen 
by Aileen Kelly.
Harvard, 582 pp., £31.95, May 2016, 978 0 674 73711 2
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... and political passage through the first half of the 19th century: Schiller, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Fourier, George Sand, Feuerbach, Louis Blanc and, crucially, Proudhon. The young Herzen, awed and fascinated by European ideas and achievements, tended to blame the tsars for his country’s pitiable backwardness. The Slavophiles and gradualists who ...

It isn’t your home

Toril Moi: Sarraute gets her due, 10 September 2020

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between 
by Ann Jefferson.
Princeton, 425 pp., £34, August 2020, 978 0 691 19787 6
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... novel’ alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008), Michel Butor (1926-2016) and Claude Simon (1913-2005). I am not sure that many people read any of them for pleasure these days. (In my more cynical moments, I don’t think anyone read them with much pleasure back then either.) We took for granted that the ‘new novel’ was crucially ...

Delivering the Leadership

Nick Cohen: Get Mandy, 4 March 1999

Mandy: The Authorised Biography of Peter Mandelson 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 302 pp., £17.99, January 1999, 9780684851754
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... be surprised by the sequel. Presented with a sensational document and an urgent need for secrecy, Simon and Schuster posted a proof copy to Roudedge at the Independent on Sunday’s office in the House of Commons, which wouldn’t have mattered if Routledge hadn’t left the paper a year earlier to join the Mirror. The envelope was opened and its contents ...

How’s the vampire?

Christopher Hitchens, 8 November 1990

King Edward VIII: The Official Biography 
by Philip Ziegler.
Collins, 654 pp., £20, September 1990, 0 00 215741 1
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... If it were true, as we are incessantly told, that the monarchy has ‘no real power’ but a strong sense of constitutional probity, then one might expect to find some evidence that the King-in-waiting was warned to be circumspect. But there’s not a hint, in all of Ziegler’s industrious fossickings, of any concern on that score. There was some royal ...

Edward Barlow says goodbye

Tom Shippey, 4 August 1994

Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England 
by Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos.
Yale, 335 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 300 05597 8
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... of colour changes which were not apparent to the untrained eye... for “if the temper was too strong... with the vehement blow of the hammer it flew in pieces; but if it was soft, it bowed, and would not touch the stone”.’ This ‘uncomplicated’ model of adolescence in other times and cultures has suffered blow after blow since Maitland’s time ...

Ideas about Inferiority

Sheldon Rothblatt, 4 April 1985

Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education 1880-1940 
by Gillian Sutherland and Stephen Sharp.
Oxford, 332 pp., £25, June 1984, 0 19 822632 2
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... leaps from the early 1900s to the monstrosities committed in Middle Europe in another generation. Strong views strongly expressed are heard, especially if uttered by men of influence and status. Historians have to decide whether the situation was as disturbing as some evidence suggests. No one disputes the existence of eugenicist views in Edwardian and ...

The Old Feudalist

D.A.N. Jones, 3 July 1986

Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass 
by Karen Blixen.
Penguin, 351 pp., £3.95, January 1986, 0 14 008533 5
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Out of Africa 
by Karen Blixen.
Century, 288 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 7126 1016 2
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Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen 
by Judith Thurman.
Penguin, 511 pp., £3.50, April 1986, 9780140096996
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... titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by the beauty of the ...

The Scandalous Charm of Luis Buñuel

Gavin Millar, 1 September 1983

... far as we can tell, all the protagonists perish, along with many ‘innocents’; and there is a strong suggestion that the explosion is intended to encompass the audience too. He was quite clear about the aims of the Surrealist movement which he was happy and flattered to be invited to join by Breton himself after the screening of Un Chien Andalou. As far ...

Following the Fall-Out

Alexander Star: Rick Moody, 19 March 1998

Purple America 
by Rick Moody.
Flamingo, 298 pp., £16.99, March 1998, 0 00 225687 8
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... angst; but if you scratch the surface, their songs turn out to express a fervent longing for a strong family life. It’s always incest or an absent father that turns a misunderstood kid into a murderer, or incites a sad girl to slit her wrists. Quite often, Moody coaxes a casual, mock-heroic poetry out of his characters’ hopelessness. His brittle ...

The Crotch Thing

James Wood: Alan Hollinghurst, 16 July 1998

The Spell 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Chatto, 257 pp., £15.99, July 1998, 0 7011 6519 7
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... were only just coming into leaf.’ Earlier in the book, Robin recalls the death of his boyfriend Simon: ‘The stoically observed sequence in the hospital, the emphatic last breath and the following silence, the subtle relaxation and emptying of the face, the timid but steady squeaking of the nurse’s shoes on the linoleum, and the dark confirming descent ...

Strangeways Here We Come

Dave Haslam: Ecstasy, 23 January 2003

The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E 
by Decca Aitkenhead.
Fourth Estate, 206 pp., £12.99, January 2002, 1 84115 337 0
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... definitions in the Misuse of Drugs Act).The role of illicit drugs in pop music has always been strong, going back to reefers and the jazz crowd, and mods dancing all night at the Marquee with a head full of pills. Various drugs have also influenced the sound and composition of music; Pete Meaden, an early mentor to the Who, encouraged the group to perform ...

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
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... of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist anthropology (and zoology) of the first Socialist Sects. The web was more and more complex – some would say tangled. It ...

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