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Old Iron-Arse

Simon Collier: Latin America’s independence, 9 August 2001

Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, 1810-30 
by Robert Harvey.
Murray, 561 pp., £25, May 2000, 0 7195 5566 3
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... Bolívar was indomitable, however. ‘Always great, he was greatest in adversity’ – so thought Daniel O’Leary, his Irish aide-de-camp. He understood (or anyway learned) when boldness would pay off, or stand a good chance of paying off. In 1819, he decided to bypass the main concentration of Spanish strength in Venezuela and to liberate neighbouring, more ...

Are you still living?

Kasia Boddy: Counting Americans, 19 October 2023

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census 
by Dan Bouk.
Picador, 362 pp., $20, August, 978 1 250 87217 3
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... was motivated by white supremacists hoping to find evidence of the population’s decline. Kelly Miller, a mathematician at Howard University, demonstrated this on several occasions, but few listened until 1947, when Daniel O’Haver Price published an article comparing two data sets: men who registered for the draft in ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... the titles of influential works on this theme such as Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness. Slotkin makes clear that the conquest of the West resulted from violence, not persuasion.In the Cold War years, many scholars aligned with the emerging discipline of American studies sought to ascertain what was distinctive ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... eel’ (‘Clive was very quick off the mark,’ Heaney drily recalled in an interview with Karl Miller). There is an interesting account of the reception of North in R.F. Foster’s new study, a compact but comprehensive guide to Heaney. Foster is well attuned to the shifting contexts, as one would expect of a leading historian of modern Ireland, but he is ...

Anger and Dismay

Denis Donoghue, 19 July 1984

Literary Education: A Revaluation 
by James Gribble.
Cambridge, 182 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 521 25315 2
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Reconstructing Literature 
edited by Laurence Lerner.
Blackwell, 218 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 631 13323 2
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Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory 
by Geoffrey Thurley.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 33436 1
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... Poetics he regards as ‘woolly rhapsodising’. He quotes in silence a passage from J. Hillis Miller as if it spoke nonsense for itself. But Gribble doesn’t make the necessary distinctions. He lumps Structuralism and Deconstruction together, forgetting that the most severe attack on Structuralism has come from Derrida’s chapter on Lévi-Strauss in De ...

Roth, Pinter, Berlin and Me

Christopher Tayler: Clive James, 11 March 2010

The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years 
by Clive James.
Picador, 325 pp., £17.99, October 2009, 978 0 330 45736 1
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... late 1960s Cambridge before setting up shop as a pen for hire in London. Working chiefly for Karl Miller, Terence Kilmartin and Ian Hamilton, on the Listener, the Observer and the New Review, he quickly made a name for himself as a versatile, witty literary journalist with a non-waffling mode of address that was thought to be distinctively, and ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
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... a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The blustering, obscene, insatiable, limitlessly restless ...

Protocols of Machismo

Corey Robin: In the Name of National Security, 19 May 2005

Arguing about War 
by Michael Walzer.
Yale, 208 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 0 300 10365 4
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Chain of Command 
by Seymour Hersh.
Penguin, 394 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 7139 9845 8
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Torture: A Collection 
edited by Sanford Levinson.
Oxford, 319 pp., £18.50, November 2004, 0 19 517289 2
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... the ongoing struggle within the security establishment over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made ‘Gitmoize’ a household word, relieves a general at Guantanamo for being too ‘soft – too worried about the prisoners’ well-being’. Both the FBI and the CIA finally decide to pull out of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib because they ...

On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... social freedom, the ability to change identities and create new selves, ends – from Daisy Miller to Portrait of a Lady to The Golden Bowl – in confinement. Against all the evidence, Ellison proposed that James had grasped the basis of that paradox in white freedom and black servitude. Although there may seem to be nothing amusing about this racial ...

Günter Grass’s Uniqueness

J.P. Stern, 5 February 1981

... Lover), but also on political and patriotic grounds (like the works of Sinyavsky and Daniel): I mean the author of ‘The Danzig Trilogy’. The three works – The Tin Drum (1959), the novella Cat and Mouse (1961) and The Dog Years (1963) – were not planned as a single whole: the collective title comes, as far as I know, not from Grass ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
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The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
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Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
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Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
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... response was ‘Now, jump out with me, Ba!’ And of course, miraculously, she did. J. Hillis Miller plausibly speculated that part of the fascination of Miss Barrett was her very inaccessibility, ‘immured in darkness and jealously guarded’: in Browning’s imagination her liberation assumed an operatic immensity, like the prisoners blinking into the ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced ...

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of the old ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... Local 282, who controlled the cement trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown ...

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