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Hard Labour

Frank Kermode: Marvell beneath the Notes, 23 October 2003

The Poems of Andrew Marvell 
edited by Nigel Smith.
Longman, 468 pp., £50, January 2003, 0 582 07770 2
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... to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important to his rhetoric ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: RBG’s Big Mistake, 8 October 2020

... Kennedy, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, David Souter and John Paul Stevens all did so. For Ginsburg to stay on the court risked ‘disaster’, in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas.’ Marshall was the first black justice on the court, a liberal; bad ...

Understanding slavery

Jane Miller, 12 November 1987

Beloved 
by Toni Morrison.
Chatto, 275 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 7011 3060 1
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... in itself, but as a symptom and symbol of the ultimate deprivations of a slave’s life. When Paul D, an ex-slave, is shown an old newspaper cutting with a drawing of a black woman he tries not to recognise, he is whipped by fear, ‘because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted ...

Eden without the Serpent

Eric Foner, 11 December 1997

A History of the American People 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 925 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 297 81569 5
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... Paul Johnson is one of the most indefatigable writers on either side of the Atlantic. In the past twenty years, the former editor of the New Statesman turned ardent Thatcherite has produced, among other books, The Birth of the Modern (weighing in at more than a thousand pages), Modern Times, a massive chronicle of the 20th century, and lengthy histories of Christianity and Judaism ...

Progress Past

Paul Langford, 8 November 1990

The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain 
by David Spadafora.
Yale, 464 pp., £22.50, July 1990, 0 300 04671 5
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George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron 
by Vincent Carretta.
Georgia, 389 pp., £38.50, June 1990, 0 8203 1146 4
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... Spadafora’s Scots are well known, almost to the point of ennui: Ferguson, Millar, Hume, Smith, Robertson. But his five Englishmen (who actually include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the ...

They should wear masks

Paul Foot: Highway Robbery, 7 January 1999

Stagecoach: A Classic Rags-to-Riches Tale from the Frontiers of Capitalism 
by Christian Wolmar.
Orion, 227 pp., £18.99, November 1998, 0 7528 1025 1
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... behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a vast octopus whose tentacles were strangling competition all over Britain. They dreamed instead of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small bus companies competing with one another ...

Short Cuts

John Sturrock: Philosophical Quick Fixes, 31 October 2002

... you could expect to get to something like it in the past would have been a chance sighting of Jean-Paul Sartre adding to an already intimidating scatter of manuscript pages while sitting in the spring sunshine outside the Deux Magots. But then France has the baccalauréat, and the inescapable philosophy paper that forms part of it, so it’s a fair assumption ...

Capos and Cardinals

Jonathan Steinberg, 17 August 1989

Fascism and the Mafia 
by Christopher Duggan.
Yale, 322 pp., £19.95, January 1989, 0 300 04372 4
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A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul
by John Cornwell.
Viking, 301 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 670 82387 2
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... one of Garibaldi’s generals called them. Duggan, who learned how to debunk myth from Denis Mack Smith, did not waste his time with the maestro. He has a similar eye for the absurd and the same finely honed prose style. Yet behind the fun he has a serious purpose. The myth-making allowed the new rulers of Sicily to pretend that the deep injustices of rural ...

Unplug the car and let’s go!

John Sutherland, 21 August 1997

The Car that Could: The Inside Story of GM’s Revolutionary Electric Vehicle 
by Michael Shnayerson.
Random House, 295 pp., $25, November 1996, 9780679421054
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... to the San Gabriel Valley firm, Aero-Vironment, the brainchild of the aerodynamicist Paul MacCready, like Wally Rippel a Caltech alumnus, who specialises in producing vehicles of apparently useless beauty and energy efficiency. One of MacCready’s more famous creations was the pedal-driven ‘Gossamer Condor’, which won the Royal Aeronautical ...

Stony Ground

Peter D. McDonald: J.M. Coetzee, 20 October 2005

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event 
by Derek Attridge.
Chicago, 225 pp., £13.50, May 2005, 0 226 03117 9
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Slow Man 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 265 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 436 20611 0
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... implicitly endorsed. (Sponsored by the Central News Agency, South Africa’s equivalent of W.H. Smith, the prize was at the time the white establishment’s most important literary award. In the Heart of the Country also won the anti-CNA Mofolo Plomer Prize founded by Ravan Press, the progressive, anti-apartheid publisher that gave Coetzee his first ...

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

... facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence. The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even ...

Mountain Novel, Hitler Novel

D.A.N. Jones, 1 October 1987

The Spell 
by Hermann Broch, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann.
Deutsch, 391 pp., £11.95, May 1987, 0 233 98049 0
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Hermann Broch: A Biography 
by Paul Michael Lützeler, translated by Janice Furness.
Quartet, 329 pp., £25, June 1987, 0 7043 2604 3
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... a good, readable story. Hermann Broch is considered ‘very hard to read’, wrote Martin Seymour-Smith in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists. ‘He used most of the Modernist technical devices available to him, but mainly stream of consciousness.’ Broch’s work has often attracted comments like that and they sound, to the general reader, like the kiss ...

Who’s your dance partner?

Thomas Meaney: Europe inside Africa, 7 November 2019

The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent 
by Stephen Smith.
Polity, 197 pp., £15.99, April 2019, 978 1 5095 3457 9
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... which can only be alleviated one bad actor at a time. In tone​ , if not in argument, Stephen Smith’s Scramble for Europe belongs to the crisis literature that began to appear in 2015 after Merkel’s decision to allow more refugees into Germany than EU burden-sharing rules required. The notion of a ‘European refugee crisis’ had already coalesced in ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Basingstoke’s Paisleyite, 21 April 2005

... newspaper that everyone needed to have a hobby. The Labour prospective parliamentary candidate, Paul Harvey, called for a by-election; he was ignored. By the time of his defection to the DUP, the Tories should have got used to being embarrassed by Hunter’s opinions. Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership campaign was ...

77 Barton Street

Dave Haslam: Joy Division, 3 January 2008

Juvenes: The Joy Division Photographs of Kevin Cummins 
To Hell with Publishing, 189 pp., £200, December 2007Show More
Joy Division: Piece by Piece 
by Paul Morley.
Plexus, 384 pp., £14.99, December 2007, 978 0 85965 404 3
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Control 
directed by Anton Corbijn.
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... room in Whalley Range’, about iron bridges and ‘a river the colour of lead’. In May 1983, Paul Slattery – who had photographed Joy Division in 1979, too, beside an industrial estate in Stockport – took some shots for Sounds of The Smiths standing in the ruins of Central Station, once the pride of the Midland Railway Company but by then a rackety ...

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