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Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... news                                (‘New York’)False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news                                (‘Turning the Wheel’)There is a cop who is both prowler and father …You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the ...

Ne me touchez pas

Nicholas Spice: Debussy’s Mission, 24 October 2019

Debussy: A Painter in Sound 
by Stephen Walsh.
Faber, 368 pp., £15.99, March 2018, 978 0 571 33016 4
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Claude Debussy: A Critical Biography 
by François Lesure, translated by Marie Rolf.
Rochester, 478 pp., £40, June 2019, 978 1 58046 903 6
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... his customary grumpiness. He had reason enough to be low-spirited: he had rectal cancer, and each day brought grim news from the front; yet, despite it all, he managed to compose. The completion of En blanc et noir broke a long creative drought and ushered in the last flowering of his genius, before illness made serious work impossible. The first movement of ...

Did he want the job?

Tobias Gregory: Montaigne’s Career, 8 March 2018

Montaigne: A Life 
by Philippe Desan, translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal.
Princeton, 796 pp., £32.95, January 2017, 978 0 691 16787 9
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... visible, in the antechamber to his tower study: In the year of our Lord 1571, aged 38, on the day before the calends of March, the anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the court, the servitude of the Parlement and public offices, still in the prime of life, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where, in peace and ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is ...

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military dictatorship then, about 150,000 people marched through the streets of Lahore. Our government supported the British, which provoked a wave of anger against them. ‘Does independence mean nothing? We’re still ...

Making It Up

Raphael Samuel, 4 July 1996

Raymond Williams 
by Fred Inglis.
Routledge, 333 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 415 08960 3
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... Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong.’ Rooks caw speculatively on the wind, and the weather is appropriately Gothic too, a ‘bitter cold’ February day with ‘vicious showers of ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
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‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
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... in simpler style: pouting and slouching with an unnaturally dark mop. They form a night and day – the bright inviting magazine cover and the sulky dark advertisement – but they work in the same manner; the syntax where a stance signifies a mood and an expression sets the scene. The cover tells us that spring is here (pinks), that playfulness is à ...

Re-reading the Bible

Stephanie West, 12 March 1992

The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Viking, 478 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 670 82412 7
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... found in our Old Testament as if it were Scripture is disconcerting (John 7.37-40): ‘In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water ...

Perseverate My Doxa

Emily Witt: What's up, Maggie Nelson?, 16 December 2021

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint 
by Maggie Nelson.
Jonathan Cape, 288 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78733 269 0
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... page of her introduction contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel ...

Diary

Charles Glass: In Beirut, 2 March 2023

... electricity generators … while the garbage was mounting everywhere, spreading its putrid smell day after day after day.’Both Atiyah and Saghie were remembering a dark past at a moment when prospects looked brighter. Atiyah was writing in 1946, as the French army was departing from ...

From Script to Scream

Richard Mayne, 18 December 1980

Caligari’s Children 
by S.S. Prawer.
Oxford, 307 pp., £8.95, March 1980, 9780192175847
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The Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman 
by Robert Phillip Kolker.
Oxford, 395 pp., £8.50, April 1980, 0 19 502588 1
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... a nostalgic tribute to minor pleasures outgrown. He glances at some recent works in the canon: Robin Hardy’s rather unconvincing The Wicker Man, Nicholas Roeg’s dazzling Don’t look now, even William Friedkin’s grotesque gallimaufry The Exorcist – whose best section was surely its prologue, jangling the nerves with a loud, jumpy soundtrack broken ...

A horn-player greets his fate

John Kerrigan, 1 September 1983

Horn 
by Barry Tuckwell.
Macdonald, 202 pp., £10.95, April 1983, 0 356 09096 5
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... expressive over three octaves, and its rich middle register was opened up for solo playing. The day of the horn virtuosi – Thaddäus Steinmüller, who played for Haydn at Esterhazy, the cheesemonger Leutgeb, Mozart’s friend, and Tuckwell’s hero, the great Giovanni Punto – had arrived.This story has been told before, but never, I think, so ...

What Blair Threw Away

Ross McKibbin: Feckless, Irresponsible and Back in Power, 19 May 2005

... Lords, but only mutilated it, and left its membership to the whims of the prime minister of the day. If Blair is worried about his reputation, a reform of the electoral system and a democratic reform of the Lords could save it. If he is to stay on for any length of time he might make a start on these. Does he really want to be remembered only for Iraq and a ...

‘You’d better get out while you can’

Charles Wheeler, 19 September 1996

... to the leadership of the Party. His return set off alarm bells in Moscow. On 19 October, the first day of a meeting of the Polish Politburo, Khrushchev descended on Warsaw at the head of a powerful delegation of Soviet political and military leaders. Several Red Army units stationed in Poland moved towards Warsaw. Next ...
African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity 
by Chris Stringer and Robin McKie.
Cape, 267 pp., £18.99, March 1996, 0 224 03771 4
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Humans before Humanity 
by Robert Foley.
Blackwell, 238 pp., £25, December 1995, 0 631 17087 1
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The Day before Yesterday: Five Million Years of Human History 
by Colin Tudge.
Cape, 390 pp., £18.99, January 1996, 0 224 03772 2
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The Wisdom of Bones: In Search of Human Origins 
by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman.
Weidenfeld, 270 pp., £18.99, April 1996, 0 297 81670 5
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The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins 
by James Shreeve.
Viking, 369 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 86638 5
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... figures set against a vast backdrop of space and time. Colin Tudge follows this line in The Day before Yesterday, but his message, unlike Hardy’s, is that there is no destiny: humanity was not fated to happen as an inevitable link in the chain between apes and angels. Evolution is often seen as progression – Stephen Jay Gould has assembled a ...

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