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Christopher Clark: Gravelotte, 1870, 21 September 2023

Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe 
by Rachel Chrastil.
Allen Lane, 485 pp., £30, June, 978 0 241 41919 9
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... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...

I’m Getting Out of Here

Leo Robson: Percival Everett, 3 November 2022

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell 
by Percival Everett.
Influx, 271 pp., £9.99, September 2021, 978 1 910312 99 5
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Erasure 
by Percival Everett.
Faber, 294 pp., £8.99, August 2021, 978 0 571 37089 4
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The Trees 
by Percival Everett.
Influx, 334 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 1 914391 17 0
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... myth. Everett shares his taste for marrying comedy and philosophy with Thomas Pynchon and the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and Good as Gold. But there’s only one writer who resembles him in any significant way. Like Everett, J.M. Coetzee was a student of logic who turned to fiction. ‘My name is Eugene Dawn,’ the narrator of his early story ‘The ...

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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... in Media movement: among AIM’s patrons were William Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate and Reagan confidant, Claire Booth Luce, Jimmy Goldsmith and Richard Mellon-Scaife. Moon now felt confident enough to take on the hated New York Times by launching the New York News World and, in 1982, to take similar aim at the ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s rhetoric was mere assertion. It was not proof or even argument. He was not clear and he was not consistent. He saw ...

Shakespeare the Novelist

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

The Vision of Elena Silves 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Collins, 263 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 00 271031 5
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Billy Bathgate 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Macmillan, £11.95, September 1989, 0 333 51376 2
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Buffalo Afternoon 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 535 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12634 7
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The Message to the Planet 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 563 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 7011 3479 8
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... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...

Fraternity

Nicholas Penny, 8 March 1990

The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. IV, Parts I-II: From the American Revolution to World War One 
by Hugh Honour.
Harvard, 379 pp., £34.95, April 1989, 9780939594177
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Primitive Art in Civilised Places 
by Sally Price.
Chicago, 147 pp., £15.95, December 1989, 0 226 68063 0
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The Return of Cultural Treasures 
by Jeanette Greenfield.
Cambridge, 361 pp., £32.50, February 1990, 0 521 33319 9
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... might suggest was the ‘evidence’ that blacks were not brothers ‘under the skin’. In Julien-Joseph Virey’s popular Histoire Naturelle du Génie Humain (first published in 1801) a profile taken from a sculpture of the bearded Zeus is contrasted with one of an Ibo African with large lips, flat nose and receding brow, and one of an orangutan. Virey ...

Ideologues

Peter Pulzer, 20 February 1986

The Redefinition of Conservatism: Politics and Doctrine 
by Charles Covell.
Macmillan, 267 pp., £27.50, January 1986, 0 333 38463 6
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Thinkers of the New Left 
by Roger Scruton.
Longman, 227 pp., £9.95, January 1986, 0 582 90273 8
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The Idea of Liberalism: Studies for a New Map of Politics 
by George Watson.
Macmillan, 172 pp., £22.50, November 1985, 0 333 38754 6
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Socialism and Freedom 
by Bryan Gould.
Macmillan, 109 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 333 40580 3
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... Covell’s scholarly, discriminating and curiously detached study of the Cambridge fogeys – Michael Oakeshott, John Casey, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton – with side-glances at Shirley Robin Letwin and the conservative potential in Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Other than that, some of the conservatives are closer to ...

Just Like Cookham

Neal Ascherson: Stanley Spencer in China, 19 May 2011

Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 591 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 954193 5
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... the diplomats were right for the wrong reasons. Neither side could match the wisdom of a man like Michael Lindsay, guide and adviser to Attlee’s group. Lindsay had lived with Mao and Zhou as a friend and comrade through the years of struggle in Yenan, but saw clearly, at an early stage, the fatal signs of growing dogmatism and arrogance in the new ...

Swiping at Suburbs

Andrew Saint: The course of British urbanism, 31 March 2005

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City 
by Tristram Hunt.
Weidenfeld, 432 pp., £25, June 2004, 0 297 60767 7
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... local politics, welfare, infrastructure and architecture, exemplified above all by Birmingham and Joseph Chamberlain, whose dapper personality adds style to the narrative of earnest civic endeavour. All that is uncontroversial. But then after 1890 comes collapse, as the middle classes and intellectuals lose faith in city living and decamp to garden cities and ...

‘You have to hang on’

Eugen Weber: Mihail Sebastian, 15 November 2001

Journal 1935-44 
by Mihail Sebastian, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Heinemann, 641 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 434 88577 0
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... and the darkness awaited him. In the introduction Ionescu addressed Sebastian by his real name: Joseph Hechter. Born in 1907 in Braila, on the Danube, Hechter had been a reader from the first: Maeterlinck at seven, Daudet, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Sienkiewicz at nine, Munchhausen at ten, Barbusse, Conan Doyle. He was in love with literature, with the theatre ...

Worse than Pagans

Tom Shippey: The Church v. the Fairies, 1 December 2016

Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church 
by Richard Firth Green.
Pennsylvania, 285 pp., £36, August 2016, 978 0 8122 4843 2
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... detail, the fairies, along with the other inhabitants of Fairyland – in the mid-19th century Michael Aislabie Denham listed more than 150 species, ‘hobbits’ included – gave the medieval Church more of a headache than has been admitted. The main problem, we might say nowadays, was that they were ‘inadequately theorised’. What were fairies? Where ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... would be no Hamlet or Lear, no Vanya or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like ...

The Unpredictable Cactus

Emily Witt: Mescaline, 2 January 2020

Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic 
by Mike Jay.
Yale, 297 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 0 300 23107 6
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... reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the peyote religion, which had grown since the 1890s and was now attracting opposition. After a bill to ...

Squeegee Abstracts

Malcolm Bull: Gerhard Richter’s Dialectic, 10 August 2023

Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History 
by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
MIT, 661 pp., £40, September 2022, 978 0 262 54353 8
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... various forms of painterly meaning and production.’ For Buchloh, formalism is encapsulated by Joseph Kosuth’s dictum, ‘the absence of reality in art is exactly art’s reality,’ and historicity by Daniel Buren’s, ‘art, whatever it may be, is exclusively political.’ So, by implication, the ideal of a historicised formalism would be work that ...

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