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Flying the flag

Patrick Parrinder, 18 November 1993

The Modern British Novel 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 512 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 436 20132 1
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After the War: The Novel and English Society since 1945 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 310 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 9780701137694
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... of Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, Dickens’s Hard Times and half of Daniel Deronda. The ‘great tradition’ doubtless stands for something much less rigorous in Mr Patten’s mind, but it is nevertheless likely to deny to early adolescents the opportunity of enjoying some of the fiction best suited to their age group. Nor will ...

Don’t join a union, pop a pill

Katrina Forrester: ‘The Happiness Industry’, 22 October 2015

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing 
by William Davies.
Verso, 314 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 78168 845 8
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... The 18th-century forebears of utilitarianism and classical political economy like Hume and Adam Smith had doubted that we could understand much about other people, but didn’t think that that mattered much. Common psychological characteristics could be assumed, and social conventions and rules of exchange would serve to co-ordinate human behaviour and ...

Making a Mouth in a Contemptuous Manner

John Gallagher: Civility Held Sway, 4 July 2019

In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern England 
by Keith Thomas.
Yale, 457 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 23577 7
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... or green cotton cassock, a cap or such-like, and will take incredible pains for such a trifle’. Daniel Defoe agreed that other nations might be taught ‘clothing with decency, not shameless and naked; feeding with humanity, and not in a manner brutal; dwelling in towns and cities, with economy and government, and not like savages’. But these changes ...

My word, Miss Perkins

Jenny Diski: In the Typing Pool, 4 August 2005

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture 
edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell.
Ashgate, 168 pp., £40, January 2005, 0 7546 3804 9
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... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... revealed that between them Policy Exchange, Legatum, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and the TaxPayers’ Alliance have raised $9 million from US donors since 2012. The British and American right differ in the weight they place on ideological purity. With a limited cast of characters – and an even smaller pool of funders ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper ...

A Whale of a Time

Colm Tóibín, 2 October 1997

Roger Casement’s Diaries. 1910: The Black and the White 
edited by Roger Sawyer.
Pimlico, 288 pp., £10, October 1997, 9780712673754
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The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement 
edited by Angus Mitchell.
Anaconda, 534 pp., £40, October 1997, 9781901990010
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... buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement documents in the National Library in Dublin (and other items which he brought back from Africa and South America – including costumes and a butterfly ...

Basismo

Anthony Pagden, 13 June 1991

The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. VII: 1930 to the Present 
edited by Leslie Bethell.
Cambridge, 775 pp., £70, October 1990, 0 521 24518 4
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Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America 
by John King.
Verso, 266 pp., £29.95, November 1990, 0 86091 295 7
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Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post-war Period 
by David Lehmann.
Polity, 235 pp., £29.50, April 1990, 0 7456 0776 4
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... security. Mexico, the largest and wealthiest of them, has come closest. Mexico, says Peter Smith, in his chapter in the Cambridge History, ‘stands out as a paragon of political stability within Latin America’. There have been no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, either from without or from within, since the Revolution of ...

Ventriloquism

Marina Warner: Dear Old Khayyám, 9 April 2009

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 
by Edward Fitzgerald, edited by Daniel Karlin.
Oxford, 167 pp., £9.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 954297 0
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... of the past with material on the poem’s life in present-day Iran. In his useful new edition Daniel Karlin argues – the case he makes is lively and convincing – that we have been misled by all the greenery-yallery stuff that has enveloped the Rubáiyát for decades, and that a different form of attention to FitzGerald allows a fascinating study in ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... for example, the titles of influential works on this theme such as Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness. Slotkin makes clear that the conquest of the West resulted from violence, not persuasion.In the Cold War years, many scholars aligned with the emerging discipline of American studies sought to ascertain what ...

Cooling it

Colin McGinn, 19 August 1993

Donald Davidson 
by Simon Evnine.
Polity, 198 pp., £9.95, January 1992, 0 7456 0612 1
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Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction 
by Bjorn Ramberg.
Blackwell, 153 pp., £12.95, July 1989, 0 631 16458 8
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... as well as objects, as when we say that the bridge collapsed because of the explosion, or that Smith went to the shops because it occurred to her that she needed some milk. That is, we routinely include mental and physical events in our ontology. Secondly, and only slightly less obviously, we allow that there can be different instances of the same general ...

Will to Literature

David Trotter: Modernism plc, 13 May 1999

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 227 pp., £16.95, January 1999, 0 300 07050 0
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Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study 
by Tim Armstrong.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £14.95, March 1998, 0 521 59997 0
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Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative 
by Harold Segel.
Johns Hopkins, 282 pp., £30, September 1998, 0 8018 5821 6
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Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production 
by Douglas Mao.
Princeton, 308 pp., £32.50, November 1998, 0 691 05926 8
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... to an audience of fifty at the Kensington home of Lord and Lady Glenconner on the poetry of Arnaut Daniel, but the one Marinetti was due to give to an audience of five hundred at the Bechstein Hall on Futurism. ‘“Futurist” Leader in London,’ reported the Daily Chronicle, ‘Makes an Attack on the English Nation.’ If you can’t beat them, join them ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... for unsafe design. Moving to Washington in 1963, he took a job as a part-time consultant for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labour, who assigned him to prepare a report on car safety. The result was Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), a compound of eye-glazing charts, moral vitriol and wrenching anecdotal detail. Nader soon testified before ...

When Thieves Retire

Francis Gooding: Pirate Enlightenment, 30 March 2023

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia 
by David Graeber.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £18.99, January, 978 0 241 61140 1
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... as a popular variation on what would come to be the essential themes of Enlightenment thought. Daniel Defoe compared the pirate settlers of Madagascar to the founders of Rome, and Montesquieu claimed that the Greeks, too, were originally pirates; Graeber suggests that tales of pirate politics would have been well known to many writers and thinkers of the ...

Big Data for the Leviathan

Tom Johnson: Counting without Numbers, 24 October 2024

By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England 
by Jessica Marie Otis.
Oxford, 264 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 19 760878 4
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... John Cannon, an 18th-century diarist, recalled his grandfather keeping his accounts with beans. Daniel Defoe claimed to know a shopkeeper who ‘knew nothing of figures, but he kept six spoons in a place on purpose, near his counter, which he took out when he had occasion to cast up any sum’.Jessica Otis’s By the Numbers surveys what she calls the ...

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