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... it is widespread. Here are writers who have spared themselves the discomforts attendant on what W. Jackson Bate has termed ‘the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past’ through the simple expedient of ignoring the past. What then deepens is another sort of self-consciousness, and it is sad to think of ...

Among the Graves

Thomas Laqueur: Naming the Dead, 18 December 2008

The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction 
by Mark Neely.
Harvard, 277 pp., £20.95, November 2007, 978 0 674 02658 2
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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War 
by Drew Gilpin Faust.
Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95, January 2008, 978 0 375 40404 7
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... Stonewall Jackson, the deeply neurotic but irresistibly romantic, swashbuckling Confederate commander, thought that the great and swift destruction of life and property seen in the American Civil War was the essence of war generally. But this war was not swift. It was long and gruelling: 425 men, on average, died every day for 1458 days ...

The Great National Circus

Eric Foner: Punch-Ups in the Senate, 22 November 2018

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War 
by Joanne Freeman.
Farrar, Straus, 450 pp., £20.99, September 2018, 978 0 374 15477 6
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... of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was ...

Number One Passport

Julian Loose, 22 October 1992

Rising Sun 
by Michael Crichton.
Century, 364 pp., £14.99, June 1992, 0 7126 5320 1
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Off Centre: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States 
by Masao Miyoshi.
Harvard, 289 pp., £22.95, December 1992, 0 674 63175 7
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Underground in Japan 
by Rey Ventura.
Cape, 204 pp., £7.99, April 1992, 0 224 03550 9
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... icons now under Japanese management include the Rockefeller Center, Universal Studios and Michael Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become the ...

Blame it on his social life

Nicholas Penny: Kenneth Clark, 5 January 2017

Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and ‘Civilisation’ 
by James Stourton.
William Collins, 478 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 00 749341 8
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... major source for Stourton is Clark’s letters to Janet Stone, wife of the wood engraver Lawrence Stone, kept under embargo in the Bodleian but available to Stourton in the form of transcripts made before they were consigned to the library. Clark’s true feelings are more likely to be found here than anywhere else. Stourton admits to a shudder on ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... of outsider art, somewhat comically, to artistically unschooled violon d’Ingres types like D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Schoenberg, Winston Churchill and Prince Charles – talented amateur painters, possibly, but not exactly what you would call marginal or psychically alienated figures. Euphemistic, in turn, because once again the sheer intransigence of outsider ...

The Tell-Tale Trolley

Stefan Collini, 8 September 1994

Townscape with Figures: Farnham, Portrait of an English Town 
by Richard Hoggart.
Chatto, 205 pp., £16.99, June 1994, 0 7011 6138 8
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... working-class novelists (Sillitoe, Braine, Barstow et al), the discussions surrounding the work of Jackson and Marsden on education and the working class, the beginnings of ‘labour history’, even Dennis Potter’s early television plays. A special premium attached to those who embodied as well as analysed this social change, and Hoggart, an articulate and ...

Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... American sublime of Abstract Expressionism went flat; it seemed a thing of the past. Not anymore: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman come to life again, and this reanimation is charged by the female company they now keep, once overlooked peers such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. At the same time, in these bigger spaces the ...

Light, Colour and Real Estate

Amit Chaudhuri: Vikram Chandra’s short stories of Bombay, 21 May 1998

Love and Longing in Bombay 
by Vikram Chandra.
Faber, 257 pp., £6.99, March 1998, 0 571 19208 4
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... without ration cards by which they can be identified) while welcoming Michael Jackson. Mumbai, however, is not merely a local name for the city; the renaming was not just an act of official translation but an announcement of a new phase in the city’s history and self-definition. While ‘Bombay’ invoked the world of the colonial and ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... don’t have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy.’ * A few weeks later, I heard Lawrence di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, admit that ‘there’s been an uptick’ in violence. I heard Pentagon officials dismiss this as ‘desperate attacks by desperate individuals’, but I heard General Richard Myers now say about the insurgents: ‘I think ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 biography Walter Jackson Bate represents the household as affectionate, and Keats in particular as brave, just and kind. In his 2012 biography, Nicholas Roe represents the young Keats as emotionally disturbed, prone to frighteningly violent outbursts (as when, at five years of ...

Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, 22 October 1992

... to decide whether to spend large sums on building Polaris with far less US help or to give it up. Lawrence Freedman has written of the reasons for the decision to proceed with the programme: ‘The low cost of Polaris was an extremely influential factor … The main reason for this was the enormous American subsidy in making available information relating to ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... still do? How did they manage to be so frank? Early on, Seiler looks to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay of 1893, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. The essay, Seiler writes, attributed the nation’s democratic characteristics to its vastness and purported emptiness, and the consequent high degree of mobility of ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... and I went along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He was Reader then ...

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