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People and Martians

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 24 January 2019

The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties 
by Robert Conquest.
Bodley Head, 576 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 84792 568 8
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The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine 
by Robert Conquest.
Bodley Head, 412 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 84792 567 1
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... and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, his approach had none of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in ...

Clunk, Clack, Swish

Jon Day: Watching the Snooker, 8 February 2024

Unbreakable 
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Seven Dials, 262 pp., £22, May 2023, 978 1 3996 1001 8
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... he went 8-2 up in the opening round at the 1996 world championship against the Canadian player Alain Robidoux, he played the rest of the match using his non-dominant hand to strike the cue ball. After O’Sullivan won, Robidoux accused him of being disrespectful. Ronnie said he did it so as not to lose interest in the game. In the staid ...

Cubist Slugs

Patrick Wright: The Art of Camouflage, 23 June 2005

DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material; An Encyclopedia of Camouflage: Nature – Military – Culture 
DPM, 2 vols, 944 pp., £100, September 2004, 9780954340407Show More
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... pastoralism and the theme of death in arcadia. Instead, Blechman focuses on the French artist Alain Jacquet, who has used camouflage since the early 1960s, pulling it out of the imagery of France’s colonial wars and hailing it as a ‘new way of seeing’. Jacquet, who uses camouflage to secrete images within images while also incorporating material ...

Time after Time

Stanley Cavell, 12 January 1995

... name here, three films it happens, were released: Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, the Alain Resnais/Marguerite Duras Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Antonioni’s L’Avventura – each associated with a question about whether something new might happen (Samuel Beckett’s Godot and Endgame were still new), shadowed by the question whether love is an ...

Black and White Life

Mark Greif: Ralph Ellison, 1 November 2007

Ralph Ellison: A Biography 
by Arnold Rampersad.
Knopf, 657 pp., $35, April 2007, 978 0 375 40827 4
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... YMCA on West 135th Street: he came downstairs into the lobby the next morning and ran into both Alain Locke and Langston Hughes. Locke had essentially established the Harlem Renaissance as a force in 1925, with his anthology The New Negro. He happened to have met Ellison on a visit to Tuskegee earlier that year. Hughes, meanwhile, was a complete stranger to ...

Dining at the White House

Susan Pedersen: Ralph Bunche, 29 June 2023

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations and the Fight to End Empire 
by Kal Raustiala.
Oxford, 661 pp., £26.99, March, 978 0 19 760223 2
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... exceptionally brilliant group of African American and African diaspora intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a ...

Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin’s Breakthrough, 25 July 2002

Lenin 
by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 371 pp., £35, November 2001, 0 8419 1412 5
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... what made Lenin the politician of the 20th century – the century of the passion of the Real. As Alain Badiou has said, whereas the 19th century was characterised by utopian or ‘scientific’ projects and ideals which were to be fulfilled in the future, the 20th aimed at delivering the thing itself, at realising the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and ...

A Message like You

Daniel Soar: Distrusting Character, 10 August 2023

Ten Planets 
by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.
And Other Stories, 108 pp., £11.99, February, 978 1 913505 61 5
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... point of view. So why are characters so stubborn? In his 1963 manifesto, Pour un nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet called them an ‘obsolete notion’ and wished he could write without any, but his own novels show that he couldn’t. The Mexican writer Yuri Herrera can’t quite get rid of them either, though he toys with the idea. Here’s the start of ...

So it must be for ever

Thomas Meaney: American Foreign Policy, 14 July 2016

American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 244 pp., £14.99, March 2014, 978 1 78168 667 6
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A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role 
by John A. Thompson.
Cornell, 343 pp., £19.95, October 2015, 978 0 8014 4789 1
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A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s 
by Daniel J. Sargent.
Oxford, 369 pp., £23.49, January 2015, 978 0 19 539547 1
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... American globalism from within. Meanwhile, some of the most stubborn figures – Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Merze Tate – were institutionally and financially isolated in the black academy, outside of which their work was ignored. They were nearly forgotten by the following generation of black radicals, who had to cut their anti-imperial critiques from ...

Quite a Night!

Michael Wood: Eyes Wide Shut, 30 September 1999

Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrik and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ 
by Frederic Raphael.
Orion, 186 pp., £12.99, July 1999, 0 7528 1868 6
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Dream Story 
by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by J.M.Q. Davies.
Penguin, 99 pp., £5.99, July 1999, 0 14 118224 5
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... different time zones. Kubrick knows this as well as Billy Wilder did in Sunset Boulevard or Alain Resnais did in Last Year at Marienbad. In Killer’s Kiss, Kubrick has his heroine narrate her whole miserable life story over an image which simply shows a solitary ballet dancer in performance – she is the heroine’s envied and unhappy sister – and ...

Don’t look back

Toril Moi: Rereading Duras, 13 April 2023

The Easy Life 
by Marguerite Duras, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.
Bloomsbury, 208 pp., £12.99, December 2022, 978 1 5266 4865 5
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... lover. In the 1950s, she began to write avant-garde plays, and in 1959 wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. She went on to make a series of films based on her own texts, most notably India Song (1974). From the 1960s onwards, her alcoholism, which severely damaged her health, became increasingly evident. She died in 1996. Even at ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... limpid tropismes (‘inner movements’) are not here, nor the further investigations of Alain Robbe-Grillet. His 1962 story ‘La Plage’ is a good example, its present tense rinsed of all affect. Three children walk along a stretch of empty beach; nothing happens, but the nothing is full of incident. The trance-like récits of the nouveau roman ...

The Palimpsest Sensation

Joanna Biggs: Annie Ernaux’s Gaze, 21 October 2021

Exteriors 
by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie.
Fitzcarraldo, 74 pp., £8.99, September, 978 1 913097 68 4
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... clothes, changes the sheets, does her marking, buys champagne. He likes to be told he looks like Alain Delon, and to tell her the brands of his clothes as he removes them. She is bereft when he goes back to his own country, wishing she had contracted Aids from him: ‘At least he would have left me that.’ But she comes to feel that the meaninglessness of ...

The Seducer

Ferdinand Mount: De Gaulle, 2 August 2018

A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle 
by Julian Jackson.
Allen Lane, 887 pp., £35, June 2018, 978 1 84614 351 9
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... was confident that he had brought off the deception without anyone noticing. He told the startled Alain Peyrefitte, his minister of information, that ‘I had nothing to do with the insurrection of Algiers … I did not raise a little finger to encourage the movement.’ This was patently a lie, and one which alienated for ever many such as Mendès ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
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... same reasons, Schmitt has also been useful to certain thinkers on the left – Derrida, Kojève, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek. Schmitt’s appeal at this end of the spectrum is his evocation of a force that smashes the liberal façade of the dominant class, his endorsement of the virtue of antagonism when there is a ruling ...

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