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Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... strangers in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master ...
... accursed isle! Literature, art, conversation, society – everything lies dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of ...

A Nation like Lava

Neal Ascherson: Piłsudski’s Vision, 8 September 2022

Jozef Piłsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland 
by Joshua D. Zimmerman.
Harvard, 623 pp., £31.95, June, 978 0 674 98427 1
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... sooner or later join the Franco-British alliance. At first, few Poles shared his optimism. Joseph Conrad, meeting gloomily with Kraków friends as war broke out, thought that it presaged the total dominion of great powers over lesser European nationalities: the extinction of Polish hopes for ever.The war came, and then the iconic day of 6 August 1914, when ...

All My Truth

Richard Poirier: Henry James Memoirs, 25 April 2002

A Small Boy and Others: Memoirs 
by Henry James.
Gibson Square, 217 pp., £9.99, August 2001, 1 903933 00 5
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... some financial security for his final years. But except for letters from faithful admirers like Conrad and Wharton, who in 1911 would nominate him for a Nobel Prize, the reception was nugatory. It hadn’t been given, he complained, ‘the least critical justice’. Within a few months he suffered a nervous and physical collapse more severe even than his ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... mass destruction from the air was already in place before the first bomb was dropped.’ Joseph Conrad was describing the British naval bombardment of African coastal settlements when, in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he wrote of ‘the invisible whites’ who ‘dealt death from afar’. In Lindqvist’s history, too, aerial bombardment appears as a ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... Epoque, Anatole France was publishing Les Dieux ont soif, Ford Madox Ford his Fifth Queen; even Conrad would end his career with a couple of historical fictions, set once more in Napoleonic times. Twenty years later, the scene was utterly changed. By the interwar period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of ...

No Beast More Refined

James Davidson: How Good Was Nureyev?, 29 November 2007

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Fig Tree, 787 pp., £25, September 2007, 978 1 905490 15 8
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... and the last: ‘Suddenly, from nowhere, she heard a clatter of hooves on the road. “A black horse without saddle or bridle cantered along the road … The horse was part Arab and beautiful, but in this context, suddenly unpredictable and dangerous.”’ In between there are hints of symbolic subplots, paths not taken, connections waiting to be ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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... waylay him, but succeeded only once, in November 1935. Clutching their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British Union of Fascists – which she may have joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion expressed some admiration for Mussolini – she managed to get close enough to him after one of his public lectures to ask when he would be ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from the trains that bustled to and from Glasgow. But there, squashed between two shipyards, almost as if it had been built after them, stood Newark Castle. Port Glaswegians felt the castle conferred romantic credentials on a place sometimes ...

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