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Wash out your ears

Adam Shatz: Messiaen’s Ecstasies, 20 February 2025

Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography 
by Robert Sholl.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £25, May 2024, 978 1 78914 865 7
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Messiaen in Context 
edited by Robert Sholl.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £95, November 2023, 978 1 108 48791 7
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... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...

Return to Nowhere

Charles Glass: Yasser Arafat, 18 March 1999

Arafat: From Defender to Dictato 
by Said Aburish.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 7475 3629 5
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... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...

Diary

John Lloyd: The Russian reformers’ new party, 15 July 1999

... synonymous with (among other liberations) sexual liberation, and he behaved like Hugh Heffner or Richard Neville. His playboy aspect means he is dismissed as a lightweight by those who claim to know what is serious in Russia; but he gave a pungent and rousing speech. ‘The trouble we have in becoming popular,’ he said at one point, ‘is that a lot of ...

Voyagers

James Paradis, 18 June 1981

Sir Joseph Banks 
by Charles Lyte.
David and Charles, 248 pp., £10.50, October 1980, 0 7153 7884 8
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The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 
by Lynn Barber.
Cape, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 9780224014489
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A Vision of Eden 
by Marianne North.
Webb and Bower, 240 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 906671 18 3
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... the Royal Institution, in 1800, of the Geological Society (1807), which in some twenty-five years rose from 13 fellows to five hundred, and of the Astronomical Society (1820). That his opposition was unsuccessful is a measure of the strength of the movement towards specialisation. Charles Lyte’s Sir Joseph Banks: 18th-century Explorer, Botanist and ...

Battle of the Wasps

C.K. Stead: Eliot v. Mansfield, 3 March 2011

... however, is not forgotten, and when a new collection of her stories is published Eliot writes to Richard Aldington asking him to order a review copy: ‘I think her inflated reputation ought to be dealt with.’ There is now a peculiar tone in letters to Murry, one or two of which are almost like love letters: Thanks, dear John, for your adorable ...

Rise of the Rest

Pankaj Mishra: After America, 6 November 2008

The Post-American World 
by Fareed Zakaria.
Allen Lane, 292 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 1 84614 153 9
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The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order 
by Parag Khanna.
Allen Lane, 466 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 7139 9937 2
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... of the Taliban. Iraq was logically the next target. As the columnist Thomas Friedman told Charlie Rose, what the Iraqis ‘needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... audience’s sense of a forested landscape. Philip Henslowe’s list of stage properties for the Rose Theatre included a ‘bay tree’, ‘Tantalus’ tree’, and a ‘tree of golden apples’. In plays such as Lyly’s Galatea, Barton writes, ‘an entire woodland region’ seems to have been suggested by a single tree – the ‘fair oak’ situated at ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...

Trees are complicated

Maureen N. McLane: H.D. casts a spell, 2 February 2023

HERmione 
by H.D..
New Directions, 281 pp., £14.99, November 2022, 978 0 8112 2209 9
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Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. 
by Donna Krolik Hollenberg.
Michigan, 360 pp., £68, June 2022, 978 0 472 13301 7
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... as the baby’s middle name, and who gave the child the surname of her estranged husband, Richard Aldington, though he was not the father.But let’s back up: Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War ...

That Shape Am I

Patricia Lockwood: Among the Mystics, 23 January 2025

On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy 
by Simon Critchley.
Profile, 325 pp., £18.99, October 2024, 978 1 80081 693 0
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... Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David ...

A Matter of War and Peace

James Buchan, 31 July 1997

... governments on corrupt and unrentable schemes: if the lira means the Mafia and Andreotti then, in Richard Nixon’s famous outburst of 1974, Fuck the lira! Accident alla lira! Meanwhile, a country excluded from monetary union – and this is the truly diabolical feature of the euro – will be forced by the capital markets to pay higher rates of interest, run ...
... recommended me to the Observer. The literary editor of the Observer then was somebody called Jim Rose. He wasn’t the most literary person in the world. He was so funny. He was always quoting his mother. I lived in dread of Mr Rose’s mother, because he would always say: ‘My mother wouldn’t understand what you mean ...

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3
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The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4
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... there would be inflation. One must wait for economies to right themselves. (‘Is it your view,’ Richard Kahn asked Hayek when he came to Cambridge to explain his theory in 1931, ‘that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. Keynes, although he greatly disliked Hayek’s argument, saw ...

Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 
by Patrick Collinson.
Oxford, 297 pp., £17.50, January 1983, 0 19 822685 3
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Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 
by John Morrill.
Macmillan, 257 pp., £14, November 1982, 0 333 27565 9
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The World of the Muggletonians 
by Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont.
Temple Smith, 195 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 0 85117 226 1
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The Life of John Milton 
by A.N. Wilson.
Oxford, 278 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 211776 9
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Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 8: 1666-1682 
edited by Maurice Kelley.
Yale, 625 pp., £55, January 1983, 0 300 02561 0
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The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Works of Andrew Marvell 
by Warren Chernaik.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 9780521247733
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... seemed frail and eccentric. But as the decades passed, the morale and the standing of churchmen rose. Presbyterianism was parried, popery contained; the Anglican via media gave England the long peace denied to envious European states; the recruitment of graduates improved the quality of the parochial ministry; and the lay rulers of the shires found reasons ...

Shades of Peterloo

Ferdinand Mount: Indecent Government, 7 July 2022

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London 
by Vic Gatrell.
Cambridge, 451 pp., £25, May 2022, 978 1 108 83848 1
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... reformers. On his last day in court, just before his death sentence was delivered, Thistlewood rose to some eloquence (though he started quaveringly, being an awkward and rather timorous speaker):A few hours hence, and I will be no more, but the nightly breeze, which will whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its keenness, will bear to ...

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