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From Wooden to Plastic

James Meek: Jonathan Franzen, 24 September 2015

Purity 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 563 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 00 753276 6
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... within it, The Corrections sets itself apart from the work of contemporary American writers like Anne Tyler for whom the family never stopped being central. As well as looking inwards to family dynamics of love, hate and mutual incomprehension, Franzen looks outwards to the worlds of corporate power, government policy, science, economics and national ...

Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

Theo Tait: Shark Attack!, 2 August 2012

Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
by Juliet Eilperin.
Duckworth, 295 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 0 7156 4291 7
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... ogling chinless face, his scimitar-like mouth with its rows of gleaming teeth, the relentless and savage fury with which he attacks, the rage of his thrashing when caught …And so on. Yet shark attacks are an exotic rarity. There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to ...

Pink and Bare

Bee Wilson: Nicole Kidman, 8 February 2007

Nicole Kidman 
by David Thomson.
Bloomsbury, 311 pp., £18.99, September 2006, 0 7475 7710 2
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... Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Drew Barrymore, Kirsten Dunst, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, but no matter: none of them has achieved the range and starry power that Kidman still possesses, despite a string of recent disappointments – Cold Mountain, The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, Bewitched. Bullock ...

Nation-building

Rosamond McKitterick: Capetian Kings, 24 October 2024

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France 
by Justine Firnhaber-Baker.
Allen Lane, 408 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 55277 3
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... other ruling families and gaining the wealth of a dowry, as in Henry II’s second marriage to Anne of Kiev. Princesses were also used to secure alliances. Adela, daughter of Robert II, was married to the duke of Normandy in 1027; after his death a few months later, she was married to the count of Flanders.Marriage and divorce could also wreak political ...

Only in the Balkans

Misha Glenny: The Balkans Imagined, 29 April 1999

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination 
by Vesna Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, May 1998, 0 300 07312 7
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Imagining the Balkans 
by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35, June 1997, 9780195087505
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... learn, ‘a human bloodhound from a race of brigands’. As Goldsworthy points out, the cut-throat savage from the mountains is still with us: That writing about the Balkans is a free-for-all, with no inhibitions about political correctness, is shown in a recent editorial in the Evening Standard which – following the news that Albania was to hold a ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... that Parshley had cut at least 10 per cent of the original text, and showed that the most savage cuts affected Beauvoir’s account of exceptional women in history. She also demonstrated that Parshley had made a hash of Beauvoir’s philosophical vocabulary. After reading Simons’s essay, Beauvoir replied: ‘I was dismayed to learn the extent to ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
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Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
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The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
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The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
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... yourselves?’ The boy said, theatrically: ‘Oh, because we’re not like you Americans. We are savage and primitive people.’ Journalists’ accounts have their flaws, however. Least satisfactory are their descriptions of the invasion. Most of them were either embedded with the troops rolling north – Oliver Poole, David Zucchino, or Evan Wright of ...

Consulting the Furniture

Rosemary Hill: Jim Ede’s Mind Museum, 18 May 2023

Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists 
by Laura Freeman.
Cape, 377 pp., £30, May, 978 1 78733 190 7
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... had saved £8 from his pocket money and, instead of the expected bicycle, used it to buy a Queen Anne desk, which he kept all his life. He didn’t enjoy his first school, in Taunton, although his older, sportier brother, Max, was quite happy. Ede’s parents, in one of many moments that reveal them as more sympathetic and imaginative than Jim painted ...

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8
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... interests, but who apparently got him to play golf, thereby much diminishing his stature as a ‘savage god’ in the eyes of his fishing buddies. Ted Hughes measuring up a putt … it’s like trying to imagine Heathcliff playing tiddlywinks. Revelations like this are more likely to do damage to Hughes’s reputation than Bate’s salacious accounts of his ...

Entrepreneurship

Tom Paulin: Ted Hughes and the Hare, 29 November 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 756 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 571 22138 7
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... in silent rage. It is clear from Dido Merwin’s account in an appendix to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Plath, that she could be intensely demanding and jealous. And in a letter to his brother after the break-up of the marriage in 1962, Hughes refers to ‘Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality’, before saying that they are now ...

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
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... Sea, to their home in the west.’ Spenser relates the same history but degrades it by listing the savage customs derived by the Irish (who are Scots) from Scythia.Much has been written about what the View of the Present State of Ireland tells us about the Irish, who threatened Spenser’s estate in County Cork and later burned down his castle, but little ...

Getting the Ick

John Kerrigan: Consent in Shakespeare, 14 December 2023

Shakespeare on Consent 
by Amanda Bailey.
Routledge, 197 pp., £17.99, March, 978 0 367 18453 7
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Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook 
edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton and Donovan Sherman.
Cambridge, 421 pp., £95, January, 978 1 108 84340 9
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Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion 
by Bradley J. Irish.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £75, March, 978 1 350 21398 2
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... of the ex-slaves Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello, as well as of Caliban, who is called a ‘savage and deformed slave’ in the Folio edition of The Tempest, acknowledge that white supremacy has a long prehistory.In some of the most striking recent work, consent and race-making go together. Fictions of Consent, Urvashi Chakravarty’s study of bondage ...

Under-the-Table-Talk

Christopher Tayler: Beckett’s Letters, 19 March 2015

Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-65 
by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 771 pp., £30, September 2014, 978 0 521 86795 5
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... a stivver to poor Eddy, in fact I think he was owed a lot of wages!’ With his mother and her ‘savage loving’ out of the picture, the world he grew up in is apparently less distressing to contemplate (and more available as material for works like All That Fall). The cher maître treatment he gets elsewhere also seems to make him eager to keep up with ...

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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... of humour who humanised her husband as far as anyone could, not least in their shared love for Anne, their Down’s-syndrome daughter. When she died at the age of twenty, de Gaulle allegedly said to Yvonne after the funeral: ‘maintenant elle est comme les autres’ – which, if authentic, is the most touching remark of his ever to have been ...

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