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The Straight and the Bent

Elaine Showalter, 23 April 1992

Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault 
by Jonathan Dollimore.
Oxford, 388 pp., £35, August 1991, 0 19 811225 4
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Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories 
by Diana Fuss.
Routledge, 432 pp., £40, March 1992, 0 415 90236 3
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... a theory. For Dollimore, sexual dissidence is the way gender upsets hierarchies. Going back to Augustine and Milton for the semantic and theological origins of the perverse, he shows how ‘perversion was (and remains) a concept bound up with insurrection,’ whether it applied to Elizabethan vagrants, female cross-dressers, religious apostates, or ...

At Auckland Castle

Nicola Jennings: Francisco de Zurbarán, 4 June 2020

... One of the supporters of the bill was Richard Trevor, the bishop of Durham, who agreed with Augustine’s teaching that the Jews should be allowed to live scattered throughout Christian society as witnesses to the Gospel. The bill was passed and then repealed a few months later, following a heated debate about the corruption of British society by Jewish ...

Short Cuts

Jenny Diski: HRH, 4 November 2010

... Gospel of Mary Magdalene get super-large-print quotes, along with Fritz Schumacher, Gandhi and St Augustine), but also his repeated use of phrases like ‘ancient wisdom’, ‘the golden thread’, ‘integrated medicine’ and his insistence that the world has been going to rack and ruin ever since Galileo was so stubborn about the planets and that awful ...

At Driscoll Babcock

Christopher Benfey: The Shock of the Old, 16 June 2016

... a painter to the tourist trade at Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon Hotel in St Augustine, churning out O’Keeffe-like giant magnolia blossoms that surface from time to time on Antiques Roadshow. As I wandered through the exhibition, I kept thinking of one of Heade’s strangest paintings, recently rehung at the handsomely renovated ...

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
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... social and cultural boundaries. The fact is that sex has never been simply about itself; since St Augustine it has been as much, or more, about the state of the soul as about the conditions of the body. There may be moments, represented by Aristotle’s Masterpiece or The Art of Conjugal Love, when a largely naturalistic view of sexuality has dominated, but ...

Beyond the Human

Jamie McKendrick: Dante’s Paradiso, 26 March 2009

Paradiso 
by Dante, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick.
Penguin, 480 pp., £12.99, October 2007, 978 0 14 044897 9
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Paradiso 
by Dante, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander.
Anchor, 915 pp., $19.95, September 2008, 978 1 4000 3115 3
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... What do humans do in heaven? Not too much, though not too little, according to St Augustine, who foresees ‘leisure for the praises of God’ with ‘no inactivity of idleness, and yet no toil constrained by want’. But eternity is a fair stretch: over millennia, any activity might begin to pall. The 19th-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli claims in his sonnet ‘Er paradiso’:                    in paradiso Nun perdi tempo co ggnisun lavoro: Nun ce trovi antro che vviolini, riso E ppandescèlo                     in heaven you don’t waste time with any work: there’s nothing but violins, laughter and heaven’s bread For Belli’s Roman worker, heaven mainly means not having to graft, and there’s the bonus of free food – a cross between communion wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso ...

Anti-Writer

Clair Wills: Plain Brian O’Nolan, 4 April 2019

The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien 
edited by Maebh Long.
Dalkey Archive, 619 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 62897 183 5
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... of his last novel, The Dalkey Archive, which focuses obsessively on the question of whether Saint Augustine was black. The longest and most revealing correspondence is with Niall Montgomery, a close friend from university and later a collaborator on his newspaper column, with whom O’Nolan liked to share in-jokes, but on whom he could turn like a terrier, as ...

Take that, astrolabe

Tom Johnson: Medieval Time, 19 October 2023

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life 
by Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm.
Reaktion, 247 pp., £20, March, 978 1 78914 679 0
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... revealed its regular rhythm; if the tides ceased, time was out of joint. ‘What is time?’ St Augustine wondered. ‘Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm explore the many answers proposed by writers, artists and visionaries in the Middle Ages. ‘Medieval people’, they write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous ...

On board the ‘Fiona’

Edward Said, 19 December 1991

In Search of Conrad 
by Gavin Young.
Hutchinson, 304 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 09 173524 6
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... offices, shipping companies. There is, for example, a whole complex tale in his search for Augustine Padmore Williams, Conrad’s model for Lord Jim, as Gavin Young delves into the man’s life and finally visits his grave in Singapore’s Bridadar Cemetery: ‘Malays wearing headbands and wielding besoms patrolled the paths, sweeping leaves. The ...

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: Renaissance Drawings, 27 May 2010

... than an exploration of what the painting will be. The ruled lines in Carpaccio’s Vision of St Augustine are neatly mechanical, the drawing is very like an architect’s perspective. It makes you impatient for the painting to be built. The studies of drapery – there are many – determine the fall and flutter of cloaks and hems that give compositional ...

An English Vice

Bernard Bergonzi, 21 February 1985

The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 
by Jerome Hamilton Buckley.
Harvard, 191 pp., £12.75, April 1984, 0 674 91330 2
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The Art of Autobiography in 19th and 20th-Century England 
by A.O.J. Cockshut.
Yale, 222 pp., £10.95, September 1984, 0 300 03235 8
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... further, in complementary studies of developments since 1800. After a brief backward glance to St Augustine and 17th-century writers of spiritual self-examination like Bunyan and Sir Thomas Browne, Buckley focuses on the Romantic emergence of what he calls the ‘subjective impulse’, with Rousseau and Wordsworth as the founders of autobiography as we know ...

Big John

Frank Kermode, 19 March 1987

Little Wilson and Big God 
by Anthony Burgess.
Heinemann, 448 pp., £12.95, February 1987, 0 434 09819 1
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... doubt the sequel will demonstrate. ‘Confessions’, as the Preface observes, brings to mind St Augustine and Rousseau. There was a time when there were confessions as distinct from memoirs; Rousseau wrote the former, Benjamin Franklin the latter. After Southey gave currency to the word ‘autobiography’ the two tended to merge, though ...

Dialects

Francis Spufford, 2 April 1987

Greyhound for Breakfast 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 230 pp., £10.95, March 1987, 0 436 23283 9
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Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer 
by Amos Tutuola.
Faber, 156 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 0 571 14714 3
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... forces, seemingly arbitrary forces, as if they had been called up by a positive evil. Perhaps Augustine was right after all? Before he left the Manicheans. Kelman likes blending in a Latinate construction as much as his predecessors; he finds the correlative for it, as the Irish did, in the remembered shards of an imposed education. But it needs saying ...

Burning Blankets

R.W. Johnson: Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up, 7 July 2005

... to the homeless in Harare’s Hatcliffe township, the police seized the blankets and burned them. Augustine Chihuri, Mugabe’s police chief, refers to the crowds of homeless, hungry and often sick refugees as ‘a crawling mass of maggots’. Bizarrely, Mugabe talks of making Harare as spick and span as it was under Ian Smith. In 1989, Edgar Tekere, a ...

Dependence and Danger

Paul Seabright, 4 July 1985

Passion: An Essay on Personality 
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Collier Macmillan, 300 pp., £13.95, September 1984, 9780029331200
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The Needs of Strangers 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 156 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2866 6
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... it no implications of obligation.’ These examples are not unfairly chosen. A chapter on Saint Augustine suggests that freedom by itself may not meet our needs ‘unless choosing is accompanied by a sense of certainty’. It goes on to ask: ‘how can we create a world in which most people will not only be free to choose but will know how to ...

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