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The Mask It Wears

Pankaj Mishra: The Wrong Human Rights, 21 June 2018

The People v. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It 
by Yascha Mounk.
Harvard, 400 pp., £21.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97682 5
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Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World 
by Samuel Moyn.
Harvard, 277 pp., £21.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 73756 3
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... and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is illegal under international law.’ But ‘it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’ ‘The deterioration of the ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: At the Conventions, 27 September 2012

... squandered his lead over Nixon in the race for the Republican nomination in 1968 by saying he’d been ‘brainwashed’ by generals who told him the Vietnam War could be won. Last month his son Mitt arrived in Tampa persecuted for being a millionaire 250 times over, accused of sacrificing American workers on the altar of his own wealth, his status as a ...

Old America

W.C. Spengemann, 7 January 1988

Look homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe 
by David Herbert Donald.
Bloomsbury, 579 pp., £16.95, April 1987, 0 7475 0004 5
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From this moment on: America in 1940 
by Jeffrey Hart.
Crown, 352 pp., $19.95, February 1987, 9780517557419
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... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... rather than a newspaperman. In his introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be the English Schumann and wrote many now forgotten symphonic works, while everyone remembers Patience and HMS Pinafore. Hecht didn’t become a great novelist or playwright, but he found that he ...

I did not pan out

Christian Lorentzen: Sam Lipsyte, 6 June 2019

Hark 
by Sam Lipsyte.
Granta, 304 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 1 78378 321 2
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... as Purdy tells his former friend: ‘You’re a fucking loser, Milo, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that you didn’t win.’ Meritocracy turns out to be a rigged game, especially when one player inherited an advantage and the other never really bothered to roll the dice. Lipsyte, now 51 years old, graduated from Brown at a time when theory ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth rates. Before ...

Take a bullet for the team

David Runciman: The Profumo Affair, 21 February 2013

An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 400 pp., £20, January 2013, 978 0 00 743584 5
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... little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of Tunis, the invasion of Sicily and the conquest of Italy. In ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... and in some cases paid friends and lovers, of whom there were legions, to donate letters they’d received from him to the Olin archive. Hammer mines this trove with tireless ardour. Merrill’s 2001 Collected Poems is much the same length as the biography, at 885 pages. A companion volume, The Changing Light at Sandover, which comprises three books and a ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... He grew up in Leicestershire and had lived in various places but it was Suffolk, where he’d spent childhood holidays, that he really loved.He had wanted to raise his son there, to work from home, be ‘supported by the landscape’ and go on long walks: he didn’t write much about walks or landscapes, but he did once mention how much he distrusted ...

The Seductions of Declinism

William Davies: Stagnation Nation, 4 August 2022

... on global supply chains, there isn’t all that much the Bank of England or anyone else can do about it. Raising interest rates acts as a signal that the bank still takes its responsibilities seriously (it does, after all, have an official mandate to pursue an inflation target of 2 per cent), but while interest rate rises may have the effect of ...

‘I’m not signing’

Mike Jay: Franco Basaglia, 8 September 2016

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care 
by John Foot.
Verso, 404 pp., £20, August 2015, 978 1 78168 926 4
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... on Italy’s Balkan periphery overlooked by the watchtowers of communist Yugoslavia, where he’d been appointed director of the municipal asylum. Here the term – manicomio in Italian – was less controversial. Italy had had no equivalent of the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, and the legislation of 1904 that governed such institutions in Italy conceived them ...

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

E.S. Turner, 19 December 1991

Alistair MacLean 
by Jack Webster.
Chapmans, 326 pp., £18, November 1991, 1 85592 519 2
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Alistair MacLean’s Time of the Assassins 
by Alastair MacNeill.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £14.99, December 1991, 0 00 223816 0
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... nigglers could write irresistible ‘page-turners’ and make their fortunes, why did they not do so? It is a fair guess this edgy Scot would have despised current television programmes about books, concluding (as many other have already concluded) that these are designed to put the masses off reading. It was MacLean’s good fortune to start writing when ...

What It Feels Like

Peter Campbell, 4 July 1996

Degas beyond Impressionism 
August 1996Show More
Degas beyond Impressionism 
by Richard Kendall.
National Gallery, 324 pp., £35, May 1996, 1 85709 129 9
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Degas as Collector 
National Gallery, August 1996Show More
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... work, are missing: no jockeys, few portraits, no brothels, no street and café scenes, no music-hall singers. Landscapes, more of them than you might expect from a painter who was so scornful of the genre (and some of them in curiously lurid before-the-storm-colours), share the simplified outlines and generalised forms which distinguish the pictures of ...

Arctic Habits

Tony Tanner, 25 May 1995

Emerson: The Mind on Fire 
by Robert Richardson.
California, 668 pp., £27, June 1995, 0 520 08808 5
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... would certainly disagree, and he has the data; but, curiously, Emerson’s wives (and children) do not come into very sharp focus. Ellen died too young (her death, and, later, the death of his young son Waldo, were probably the two events that moved Emerson most deeply). Oddly, he opened Ellen’s coffin in 1832, and Waldo’s coffin in 1857, and Richardson ...

Sunny Days

Michael Howard, 11 February 1993

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 
by Peter Hennessy.
Cape, 544 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 224 02768 9
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Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 
by Paul Addison.
Cape, 493 pp., £20, November 1992, 0 224 01428 5
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... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what ...

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