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Spinoza got it

Margaret Jacob: Radical Enlightenment, 8 November 2012

A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy 
by Jonathan Israel.
Princeton, 276 pp., £13.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 15260 8
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... Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national ...

An Absolutely Different Life

Michael Wood: Too Proustian, 7 November 2019

Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust 
by Bernard de Fallois.
Editions de Fallois, 312 pp., €20, January 2019, 978 1 03 210214 6
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Proust avant Proust Essai sur ‘Les Plaisirs et les jours’ 
by Bernard de Fallois.
Les Belles Lettres, 192 pp., €21.50, May 2019, 978 2 251 44939 5
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‘Le Mystérieux Correspondant’ et autres nouvelles inédites 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Luc Fraisse.
Editions de Fallois, 174 pp., €18.50, October 2019, 978 1 03 210229 0
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... is a book, de Fallois says, ‘on which time has collaborated’. ‘It is Lost Time without the Search.’ He also comments on the title, with its glance at Hesiod’s Works and Days, which indicates, he says, ‘the moral content of the book, a sadness ashamed of itself that undergoes the double corrective of humour and analysis’. The sadness is ...

Eye to the Keyhole

Tom Crewe: Pratt and Smith, 25 April 2024

James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder 
by Chris Bryant.
Bloomsbury, 313 pp., £25, February, 978 1 5266 4497 8
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... two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a critique of the British aristocracy, a history of ten gay MPs who opposed appeasement and, only last year, a book called Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament. Bryant was also the first gay MP to celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest ...

It’s raining, so I’ll take an umbrella

Andy Clark: The Birth of the Computer, 1 December 2005

Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker 
edited by Christof Teuscher.
Springer, 542 pp., £46, February 2004, 3 540 20020 7
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... In the 21 essays gathered here by Christof Teuscher, there is the mathematical biologist in search of new explanations of the emergence of patterns in nature; the proto-connectionist investigating neurally-inspired models of learning and cognition; the code-breaker, whose wartime contributions were crucial to the Allies’ success; and the fledgling ...

Mrs Winterson’s Daughter

Adam Mars-Jones: Jeanette Winterson, 26 January 2012

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 230 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 0 224 09345 3
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... first success. When I met Jeanette she was working as the women’s editor at Brilliance Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near where I lived. She poured a lot of energy into the job. She was efficient and didn’t mind hard work. She was helpful. When the two men who ran the press, Roy ...

A Rage for Abstraction

Jeremy Harding, 16 June 2016

The Other Paris: An Illustrated Journey through a City’s Poor and Bohemian Past 
by Luc Sante.
Faber, 306 pp., £25, November 2015, 978 0 571 24128 6
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How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People 
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Allen Lane, 427 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84614 602 2
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... tells us, with a customised café scene, and clubs like Le Monocle, which opened in the 1920s. Gay women were prominent in the entertainment industry, among them Suzy Solidor, who sat for some of the painters – there’s a famous après-Deco portrait by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles estate, or at ...

Staying at home

Ronald Fraser, 27 July 1989

Federico Garcia Lorca 
by Ian Gibson.
Faber, 542 pp., £17.50, July 1989, 0 571 14815 8
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... more rewarding to accept Lorca’s sexuality as a given, and allow us to see his development as a gay poet, rather than using his work to ‘prove’ what we already accept? To concentrate on him as living – deeply torn between a religious sense of guilt and desire, between ‘God and Dionysus’, as Gibson writes – the anguish that so many homosexuals ...

Mortal Beauty

Paul Delany, 21 May 1981

Feminine Beauty 
by Kenneth Clark.
Weidenfeld, 199 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 297 77677 0
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Of Women and their Elegance 
by Norman Mailer.
Hodder, 288 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 340 23920 4
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Nude Photographs 1850-1980 
edited by Constance Sullivan.
Harper and Row, 204 pp., £19.95, September 1981, 0 06 012708 2
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... not remained immune from the crisis of modern art: photographers have been caught in an endless search for gimmicks, striving to keep alive a genre whose ‘aura’ has been stripped away by the vulgarisation of sex, the limitless reproduction of pin-ups and the overwhelming dominance in our lives of commercial images. One may be sceptical of nude ...

Episteme, My Arse

Christopher Tayler: Laurent Binet, 15 June 2017

The Seventh Function of Language 
by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor.
Harvill Secker, 390 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 910701 58 4
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... bastards’. In no time he and Simon, dressed only in little white towels, are padding through a gay sauna near the Gare de Lyon in search of a young man called Hamed, to whom Barthes might have given a copy of the missing document. Hamed, they’ve been told, has a fringe and an earring, but the steam makes it hard to ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half black, half white; half young, half old; three-quarters straight, a quarter ...

The Body in the Library Is Never Our Own

Ian Patterson: On Ngaio Marsh, 5 November 2020

... Violence. Theft. Sexual greed. They’re commonplace to us. We do our Stanislavsky over them. We search out motives and associated experiences. We try to think our way into Macbeth or Othello or a witch-hunt or an Inquisitor or a killer-doctor at Auschwitz and sometimes we think we’ve succeeded. But confront us with the thing itself! It’s as if a tractor ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Conflict of Two Egos, 3 June 1982

... two machismos’. The view is easy to deny (just as it is easy to deny that there has been a search for political advantage): but it is a view which it would be a mistake to dismiss. It is natural, and important, for a country which has lost so much in the way of face in the last few years to attempt to save it. That is why it was a mistake to start with ...

The Nephew

David Thomson, 19 March 1981

Charmed Lives 
by Michael Korda.
Penguin, 498 pp., £2.50, January 1981, 0 14 005402 2
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... and production values of English history as much as his new friend, Churchill. His pictures were Gay Hussar and high Tory. In time, he opened offices in America ample enough to hide the coming and going of the British Secret Service. At a crucial moment, 1941, he made That Hamilton Woman, the Nelson-Emma story, with Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and a rousing ...

Bard of Tropes

Jonathan Lamb: Thomas Chatterton, 20 September 2001

Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture 
by Nick Groom.
Palgrave, 300 pp., £55, September 1999, 0 333 72586 7
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... defacements of the original must be detected and removed if it is to be properly appreciated. The search for the authentic in literature relies on the presence of the inauthentic; without it the recovery of the original cannot begin. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the most daring of Coleridge’s poems, embeds the corrupting presence in the ...

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