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On the Via Dolorosa

Neal Ascherson: Remarque’s Fiction, 7 May 2015

The Promised Land 
by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Vintage, 423 pp., £16.99, February 2015, 978 0 09 957708 9
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... it.’ They remember the ‘Laon Breviary’, the set of rules for novice fugitives that they drew up while hiding together in a French chicken coop. Paragraph 12 read: ‘Emotion clouds judgment; anxiety too. It may never happen.’ Ludwig is directed to a shabby hotel, already crowded with European refugees in many stages of crazy optimism, suicidal ...

Alonenesses

William Wootten: Alun Lewis and ‘Frieda’, 5 July 2007

A Cypress Walk: Letters to ‘Frieda’ 
by Alun Lewis.
Enitharmon, 224 pp., £20, October 2006, 1 904634 30 3
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... under the guise of meeting a mutual friend, Aykroyd had finally agreed to Lewis’s request. She drew the line at the luxurious but rather notorious Taj Mahal, and she and Lewis stayed at a beach-side guest house. After they had made love for the first time, Aykroyd revealed that she was pregnant with Wallace’s child. ‘For a moment he did not move, then ...

Bloody Glamour

Tim Parks: Giuseppe Mazzini, 30 April 2009

Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830-1920 
edited by C.A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini.
Oxford, 419 pp., £45, September 2008, 978 0 19 726431 7
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... present. Even discounting the fact that all the accounts we have of his life, including Denis Mack Smith’s authoritative 1994 volume, tend to hagiography, it’s clear that from the earliest age Mazzini was both physically attractive and immensely charismatic. Briefly united under Napoleon, Italy was returned in 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, to a divided ...

Cramming for Success

James Wood: Hardy in London, 15 June 2017

Thomas Hardy: Half A Londoner 
by Mark Ford.
Harvard, 305 pp., £20, October 2016, 978 0 674 73789 1
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... he puts it in his poem ‘Wessex Heights’. Ford reminds us that in the maps of Wessex that Hardy drew and which were first included in the 1895-96 edition of his fiction, there are no railways, despite the many appearances of trains in his work: in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ‘modern life’ is described as stretching out its ‘steam feeler to this point ...

Pistols in His Petticoats

Neal Ascherson: The Celebrated Miss Flora, 15 December 2022

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald 
by Flora Fraser.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 4088 7982 5
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... mitches upon his face and hand as would have made any other but himself fall into despair.’ This drew from the prince ‘such hideous cries and complaints as would have rent the rocks with compassion’. Meanwhile, as Fraser enthusiastically describes, the MacDonald ladies wrestled with calico and wool to construct an outfit that would fit a strapping fellow ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...

Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... the Bible.’ A Festschrift to mark what would have been his hundredth birthday in 2012 drew contributions from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps ...

Credibility Brown

Christopher Hitchens, 17 August 1989

Where there is greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future 
by Gordon Brown.
Mainstream, 182 pp., £4.95, May 1989, 1 85158 233 9
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CounterBlasts No 3: A Rational Advance for the Labour Party 
by John Lloyd.
Chatto, 57 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3519 0
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... contrast Reaganism and Thatcherism, both of which had been described as ‘revolutions’, and I drew the easy job of discussing the first. Reaganism, already a waning memory, was never much more than a fraud, based on a three-credit-card trick and appealing principally to hedonism and credulity. Taxes would not go up, but everybody would be better-off and ...

Swanker

Ronald Bryden, 10 December 1987

The Life of Kenneth Tynan 
by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £16.95, September 1987, 9780297790822
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... in a line what we had seen. That seems the important thing to tell posterity. The pictures he drew of Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson and Redgrave, of Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorn-dike and Maggie Smith, are true likenesses. We saw them too, and he can be ...

Tory History

Alan Ryan, 23 January 1986

English Society 1688-1832 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 439 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 30922 0
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Virtue, Commerce and History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 521 25701 8
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... is, for Pocock, the beginning of wisdom about the 18th century: between them, Ferguson, Millar and Smith made it clear that the contest between the ancients and the moderns had decisively gone to the moderns. However much we might lament the passing of the ancient republics with their militias based on the armed freeholding peasant, their time was over. In the ...

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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... to the West.’ That was the lesson the American anti-communist Soviet-watcher Louis Fischer drew in 1949 from observation of Soviet ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) in Europe after the Second World War. In the context of the burgeoning Cold War, his analysis made sense to a lot of people in the West. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who had been ...

Warrior Librarians

Neal Ascherson: Cultural Pillaging, 2 July 2020

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War Two Europe 
by Kathy Peiss.
Oxford, 296 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 19 094461 2
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... as they copied photographs of Axis agents, bargained for access to secret documents and maps, and drew up assessments of German public opinion.By now, the scale of their operation was enormous, and the quantity of printed paper they were dealing with was threatening to become unmanageable. As the American 12th Army Group approached Paris in the summer of ...

Locum, Lacum, Lucum

Anthony Grafton: The Emperor of Things, 13 September 2018

Pietro Bembo and the Intellectual Pleasures of a Renaissance Writer and Art Collector 
by Susan Nalezyty.
Yale, 277 pp., £50, May 2017, 978 0 300 21919 7
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Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist 
by Gareth Williams.
Oxford, 440 pp., £46.49, August 2017, 978 0 19 027229 6
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... away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then replicate. Sachiko Kusukawa in Picturing the Book of Nature (2012) and ...

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour 
by Matthew Herbert.
Accidental
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... piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a silver dollar and drew it out into a wire that would stretch from the base to the top of the Statue of Liberty. The ink she used for Pornographic Drawings (1997) was made by chemically dissolving videos confiscated by HM Customs and Excise. Or so it said on the label. There was no ...

A Few Home Truths

Jonathan Rée: R.G. Collingwood, 19 June 2014

R.G. Collingwood: ‘An Autobiography’ and Other Writings, with Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work 
edited by David Boucher and Teresa Smith.
Oxford, 581 pp., £65, December 2013, 978 0 19 958603 5
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... of their own, independent of the processes through which they are known. The realists drew inspiration from G.E. Moore, who had argued around the turn of the century that genuine knowledge lifts our minds above the historical hurly-burly of words, impressions and emotions and puts us in touch with an impersonal and unchangeable world of ...

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