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More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an actor; and Vanessa Shaw, a bluestocking academic. The writers in contention (if only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd ...

The Punishment of Margaret Mead

Marilyn Strathern, 5 May 1983

Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth 
by Derek Freeman.
Harvard, 379 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 674 54830 2
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... for dominant patterns. Here she was developing a mode laid out by others – not-ably by Ruth Benedict following Boas, both of whose influence on Mead’s work Freeman describes in detail. She was very good at it, although the approach is not one that would be adopted now, and perhaps it was collapse of interest in dominant cultural patterns which more ...

Life and Work

Philip Horne, 8 May 1986

Falling apart 
by Nicholas Salaman.
Secker, 190 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 436 44087 3
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Memoirs of Many in One 
by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, April 1986, 0 224 02371 3
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Free Agents 
by Max Apple.
Faber, 197 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13852 7
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... up a society party in Sydney; as an enthusiast making a tramp into ‘the Mystic’; as Sister Benedict on a nuns’ picnic humiliated by ineffectualness when another sister, ancient and saintly, collapses and is carted off; and as herself, or Dolly Formosa, performing highlights of Shakespeare and dancing naked improvisations in the towns of the ...

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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... of Lyndsey Turner’s ploy, abandoned during the previews of her 2015 production, of having Benedict Cumberbatch deliver it as a freestanding prologue, getting what has become a hyper-canonical hurdle out of the way at the show’s outset.) Samuel Pepys’s diary, as well as citing the passage when contemplating mortality and the plague, records that he ...

Every Slightest Pebble

Clarence Brown, 25 May 1995

The Akhmatova Journals. Vol. I: 1938-1941 
by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova.
Harvill, 310 pp., £20, June 1994, 0 00 216391 8
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Remembering Anna Akhmatova 
by Anatoly Nayman, translated by Wendy Rosslyn.
Halban, 240 pp., £18, June 1991, 9781870015417
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Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle 
edited by Konstantin Polivanov, translated by Patricia Beriozkina.
Arkansas, 281 pp., $32, January 1994, 1 55728 308 7
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Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet 
by Roberta Reeder.
Allison and Busby, 592 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 85031 998 6
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Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam 
by Beth Holmgren.
Indiana, 225 pp., £25, September 1993, 0 253 33860 3
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... more perilous, Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her manuscript, not yet entitled Hope against Hope, I had read at her kitchen table and then, with her blessing, sent to the West. It was not a time for too many memoirs. Lourié was my entrée to Akhmatova. Some year or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail ...

History’s Postman

Tom Nairn: The Jewishness of Karl Marx, 26 January 2006

Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde 
by Jacques Attali.
Fayard, 549 pp., €23, May 2005, 2 213 62491 7
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... bit of modernity had been produced in the same country, in Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, print was the precondition of all modern ‘imagined communities’. Now it would give rise to the most widely-read book of the modern epoch, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of ...

Partnership of Loss

Roy Foster: Ireland since 1789, 13 December 2007

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 
by Paul Bew.
Oxford, 613 pp., £35, August 2007, 978 0 19 820555 5
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... Legg’s pioneering work, Newspapers and Nationalism, in tracing how immediately the insights of Benedict Anderson can be mapped onto the growth and form of Irish nationalist consciousness in imagining a community. But his overall preoccupation is with disunion rather than Union. Though he opens by unearthing D.P. Moran’s 1904 parody of A Midsummer ...

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Andrew O’Hagan: If something happens to me…, 5 May 2005

... Saul Bellow seemed to me to possess more moral lustre than your average pope, but then I only read him, I didn’t marry him, as five people did. The pope and Saul Bellow were enemies of nihilism in one form or another, and I would have given anything to hear a conversation between the two, the Pole so miniature in his certainties on the one side, and the ...

The Bergoglio Smile

Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

... for promotion’ that he would deplore. Recently, he disclosed that while banished to Córdoba he read ‘all 37 volumes of Ludwig Pastor’s History of the Popes’. But there is perhaps a third and more banal way to see Bergoglio. In this, he is simply a great conformist. His rise, in this version, is not deliberate or calculated. It happened because it was ...

A Singular Entity

Peter C. Perdue: Classical China, 20 May 2021

What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History 
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019, 978 0 674 73714 3
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... property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn’t read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument ...

Wanting to Be Something Else

Adam Shatz: Orhan Pamuk, 7 January 2010

The Museum of Innocence 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 720 pp., £18.99, December 2009, 978 0 571 23700 5
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... science, its art, its movies, its soda pop), and invariably coming up short, haunted by what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘spectre of comparison’. On a trip to Venice as the sultan’s ambassador, Enishte Effendi, the uncle of the hero of My Name Is Red, sees a painting of an ‘infidel’ on a palazzo wall and feels as if he’s looking at his ...

Paisley’s Progress

Tom Paulin, 1 April 1982

... he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to working-class ...

The Partisan

Jeremy Harding, 23 June 1994

The Search for Africa: A History in the Making 
by Basil Davidson.
Currey, 373 pp., £25, March 1994, 0 85255 719 1
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... of what she calls his ‘romantic connoisseurship of struggle’. In the Guardian (October 1992) Benedict Anderson took issue with Davidson on several counts: that the virtues of armed anti-colonial struggle which he affirmed, especially in Portuguese Africa, were soon undone ‘by Stalinism and one-party bureaucratic dictatorships’; that if the ...

Yuh wanna play bad?

Christopher Tayler: Henry Roth, 23 March 2006

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth 
by Steven Kellman.
Norton, 372 pp., $16.99, September 2005, 0 393 05779 8
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Call It Sleep 
by Henry Roth.
Picador US, 462 pp., $15, July 2005, 0 312 42412 4
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... become a well-known Village figure after moving to New York in 1924. She was friendly with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and Roth met Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe at her salon on 61 Morton Street. She set out to make an intellectual of him in the manner of Henry Higgins, Kellman says, and he suspects that her mentoring of ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... holding her own under questioning by prelates and canons. Without formal education, unable to read or write, she responded with such luminous clarity that when she repeated that her voices had returned to her, the scribe was moved to exclaim, ‘Responsio mortifera’ (‘a fatal reply’), in the margins of the court record. ...

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