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A Strange Blight

Meehan Crist: Rachel Carson’s Forebodings, 6 June 2019

‘Silent Spring’ and Other Writings on the Environment 
by Rachel Carson, edited by Sandra Steingraber.
Library of America, 546 pp., £29.99, March 2018, 978 1 59853 560 0
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... suppose that, however the physical environment might mould Life, that Life could never assume the power to change drastically – or even destroy – the physical world. These beliefs have almost been part of me for as long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened was so shocking that, as I have said, I shut my mind ...

Operation Barbarella

Rick Perlstein: Hanoi Jane, 17 November 2005

Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon 
by Mary Hershberger.
New Press, 228 pp., £13.99, September 2005, 1 56584 988 4
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... Kerry with Tits’: five syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and anxiety in America. In Jane Fonda’s War Mary Hershberger does a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... the key savings will have to be found.’ In essence, the Broadcast/Production split transferred power from the setter-uppers to the putter-outers: a microcosm of a wider power shift from the producer to the consumer which defined the last quarter of the 20th century. Its context was a perception that the BBC was a ...

Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?

Blair Worden: A Play for Plotters, 10 July 2003

... involve Shakespeare’s writing in the politics of his time. Contemporary critics, Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore at their head, draw bold inferences from it. In widely influential works they describe the performance at the Globe as a ‘famous attempt to use the theatre to subvert authority’; as a move ‘to wrest legitimation from the established ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
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How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
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... intellectual histories have both an inner philologist and an inner philosopher, but the balance of power varies.Burrow’s inner philologist has the upper hand. He is comfortable with imitation as a slippery concept, a ‘moving target’, ‘one of the great migrant concepts in Western literature’, with a ‘very long, and in many respects very ...

One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... elite on the other, it was generally amorphous in outlook but united in dislike of Soviet power. He believed in the official ideology even less than those he frequented, and had done so for longer: an unconditional zapadnik, he was convinced that the future of the country lay in the achievement of the type of orderly and durable freedom responsible ...

Sic transit Marshall McLuhan

Frank Kermode, 17 March 1988

Letters of Marshall McLuhan 
edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye.
Oxford, 562 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 540594 3
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... As his programme developed, he began to wonder how he could fulfil it singlehanded, wishing he had power to hire his own colleagues. He badly needed to write a book about ‘the men of 1914’, the Modernists so critical to his version of history. He explained to Pound that the vortex he created with Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis had been debased, had become ‘a ...

Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

The World, the Text and the Critic 
by Edward Said.
Faber, 327 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 571 13264 2
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The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 201 pp., £4.95, December 1983, 0 416 36140 4
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The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. VIII: The Present 
edited by Boris Ford.
Penguin, 619 pp., £3.50, October 1983, 0 14 022271 5
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... of “textuality” ’ that literary theory has got itself into and appears to share Jonathan Swift’s contempt for what Said calls ‘the extraordinary Laputan idea that to a certain extent everything can be regarded as a text.’ Some Professor of Applied Linguistics in Gulliver’s Travels had ‘a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... They did not wish to be repatriated to what they saw as an illegitimate and oppressive occupying power. The Soviet Union’s dogged refusal to admit any distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Soviet citizens with regard to repatriation left it with no way of explaining why so many of its citizens refused to return.Tromly’s book is about the de facto ...

Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
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... really a revelation that the Elsinore depicted in Hamlet is the place of a relentless struggle for power better described in terms of the hunt than of Providence. The idea that Shakespeare’s tragedies depict lamentable but temporary blips in an otherwise divinely sanctioned hierarchical order is one that was fading even before ...

A Pair of Yellow Gloves

Tim Parks: Stendhal’s ‘Italian Chronicles’, 19 October 2017

Italian Chronicles 
by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2017, 978 1 5179 0011 3
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... he remarked that ‘noble souls are self-sufficient, while others are frightened and run mad.’ Jonathan Keates, in his insightful biography, frequently refers to this ‘Moscow-courage’ that Stendhal showed at key moments in his life. There were two duels. There was a commendation for courage at the Battle of Castelfranco in 1801. Essentially, Stendhal ...

Diary

Keith Thomas: Working Methods, 10 June 2010

... together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.Perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
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... interested in his own place in the firmament’. According to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, McGuinness tended to defer to Adams. If McGuinness was ever negotiating alone he would say he needed to discuss a proposal with Adams. Adams, in similar circumstances, sometimes kept his own counsel. In June 2004 Adams ‘very ...

Save the feet for later

Edmund Gordon: Leonora Carrington, 2 November 2017

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington 
by Joanna Moorhead.
Virago, 304 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 349 00877 6
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‘The Debutante’ and Other Stories 
by Leonora Carrington.
Silver Press, 153 pp., £9.99, April 2017, 978 0 9957162 0 9
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Down Below 
by Leonora Carrington.
NYRB, 69 pp., £8.99, May 2017, 978 1 68137 060 6
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Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde 
edited by Jonathan Eburne and Catriona McAra.
Manchester, 275 pp., £75, January 2017, 978 1 78499 436 5
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... of me, because I, too, was jammed between Saint-Martin and Spain. I was horrified by my own power. The Surrealists talked a good deal about madness, but Carrington was unusual in knowing what it felt like. In Andorra, she lost the ability to walk in a straight line. She saw secret messages on advertising billboards, and ‘heard the vibrations of beings ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
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... and Harriet Monroe?Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valley that poetry had the power to ‘soothe grief’. Some modern champions of ecopoetry may feel something similar, and the idea of poetry as a soothing, healing form of achieved attunement – Allingham called it a ‘mystic relation with the Universe’ – has a long ...

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