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The Staidness of Trousers

E.S. Turner, 6 June 1996

A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore 
by Tony Gray.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 344 pp., £20, April 1996, 1 85619 578 3
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... Street. Since Tony Gray does not tell us a great deal about this novel, it seemed a good idea to lay aside, temporarily, his amused and amusing book and plunge into Moore’s extraordinary tale of the wicked, wicked world of wet-nursing, the reality behind those advertisements in the personal column of the Times: ‘A good breast of milk ...

I’m all for it

R.W. Johnson, 30 March 2000

Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII 
by John Cornwall.
Viking, 430 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 670 87620 8
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... and disagreement with the author. The thesis is simple enough. Pacelli was born into a caste of lay Vatican lawyers who had served the Popes since 1819. He was never a normal boy – but godly, smug, effeminate, delicate and priggish, captivated by the ethic and romance of asceticism. Solitary and highly strung, he was ‘born a priest’ and ordained at ...

Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

... along with the wonderful Schreber.’ Freud is here referring to the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of his nervous illness had appeared in 1903, and constitute one of the most celebrated case-studies of paranoia in the literature. The letter of 1910 to Jung goes on: ‘Schreber, who ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry ...

What’s next?

James Wood: Afterlives, 14 April 2011

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory 
by John Casey.
Oxford, 468 pp., £22.50, January 2010, 978 0 19 509295 0
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... How could anyone think that his soul was now flying off to an eternal judgment? There he lay, in his frailty and banality, his body the register, the lined book, of his 79 years. The corpse was so palpable in its morbidity, so finished. But for centuries, people believed the book would be opened again. In a late 15th-century mural in Albi ...

It all fell apart

Abigail Green: Pogroms in Ukraine, 21 July 2022

In the Midst of Civilised Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-21 and the Onset of the Holocaust 
by Jeffrey Veidlinger.
Picador, 480 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 5098 6744 8
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... death while dancing and singing a Sabbath table song. At this stage, however, the real problem lay not with the peasant masses but with a military leadership brutalised and corrupted by its experiences in the Russian army. It was in this institutionally antisemitic environment that the religious prejudices officers and soldiers had imbibed in their ...

Pop, Crackle and Bang

Malcolm Gaskill: Fireworks!, 7 November 2024

A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day 
by John Withington.
Reaktion, 331 pp., £25, August, 978 1 78914 935 7
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... up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and ...

Bitov’s Secrets

Michael Glenny, 18 October 1984

... but also knocked about and threatened. The difference between this and his subsequent Moscow story lay in the alleged perpetrators of his kidnapping. This time they were not British or Italian intelligence agents but what Bitov described as ‘White Guards’. This is Soviet shorthand for politically active Russian émigrés, and it usually refers to an ...
... could live in a suburban semi with round-cornered bays and a tiled roof – but believe the future lay with blocks of workers’ flats; accept that a new world should be built, while taking only tentative steps towards transforming their own environment. There are sections of this exhibition which show where their radio programmes were broadcast from, what ...

Do it in Gaelic

Jeremy Harding: Australia’s Boat-People, 26 September 2013

... must not prejudice their claim.) But Labor has never been far behind the Coalition. In the 1990s Paul Keating’s administration introduced mandatory detention for anyone entering Australia without a valid visa. In 2012, during Julia Gillard’s tenure, it emerged that the security services had ruled against the release of more than fifty asylum seekers on ...

Tables and Chairs

Christopher Tayler: J.M. Coetzee, 21 March 2013

J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing 
by J.C. Kannemeyer, translated by Michiel Heyns.
Jonathan Ball, 710 pp., R 325, October 2012, 978 1 86842 495 5
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Here and Now: Letters 2008-11 
by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee.
Viking, 256 pp., $27.95, March 2013, 978 0 670 02666 1
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The Childhood of Jesus 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Harvill Secker, 210 pp., £16.99, March 2013, 978 1 84655 769 9
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... too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and Paul Auster sent between July 2008 – a month after Kannemeyer’s approach – and August 2011. This extraordinary book comes with no explanations other than the flap copy: Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had been ...

The Cruel Hoax of Development

Basil Davidson, 6 March 1997

Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone 
by Paul Richards.
James Currey/Heinemann, 182 pp., £35, November 1996, 0 85255 397 8
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A Claim to Land by the River: A Household in Senegal 1720-1994 
by Adrian Adams and Jaabe So.
Oxford, 300 pp., £50, October 1996, 0 19 820191 5
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... to another, contrary process and that Africa’s peoples are retaking possession of themselves. Paul Richards is a veteran British anthropologist whose special interest is the rainforest peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia: groups which have spent most of the Nineties in apparently fruitless pestering or killing of themselves and their neighbours. Richards ...

Site of Sin and Suffering

James Romm: Theban Power, 2 July 2020

Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece 
by Paul Cartledge.
Picador, 320 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 5098 7317 3
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... to have founded Thebes at the direction of the Delphic oracle, on the spot where a particular cow lay down to rest. That spot became known as the Cadmea, the high ground of Thebes. The city walls had seven gates, at which its seven mythic attackers perished. New walls were built later, enclosing a much larger area, and the Cadmea became for Thebes what the ...

Here Be Fog

J.H. Elliott: Mapping the American West, 23 February 2012

The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-63 
by Paul Mapp.
North Carolina, 455 pp., £44.50, February 2011, 978 0 8078 3395 7
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... desart yet unclaim’d by Spain? The answer to the question posed in these lines quoted by Paul Mapp in The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire turned out to be a resounding yes. In 1738, when Dr Johnson wrote his poem, some two-thirds of North America was still terra incognita, as far as Europeans were concerned. A vast expanse of territory, home ...

Try the other wrist

Lara Feigel: Germany in the 1940s, 23 October 2014

The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s 
by Werner Sollors.
Harvard, 390 pp., £25.95, April 2014, 978 0 674 05243 7
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... Germany, where anti-Nazi intellectuals like Mann himself would be empowered by the Allies to lay the cultural foundations of an enduring pan-European peace. Visiting Munich at the end of the war – still in uniform – he discovered that many of the artists he admired had compromised with the Reich. The Americans and British, he realised, were too busy ...

The Ultimate Magical Synaesthesia Machine

Rob Young: Painting Music, 22 September 2011

The Music of Painting 
by Peter Vergo.
Phaidon, 367 pp., £39.95, November 2010, 978 0 7148 5762 6
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... The White Girl (1862), had its musical appellation added later, possibly as a result of the critic Paul Manz’s reference to the subject of the picture as ‘la symphonie du blanc’. Vergo finds various other dead ends. In Cézanne’s Young Girl at the Piano: Overture to ‘Tannhäuser’ (1869-70), an old woman sits mending a stocking while a girl extends ...

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