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Limits of Civility

Glen Newey: Walls, 17 March 2011

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty 
by Wendy Brown.
Zone, 167 pp., £19.95, October 2010, 978 1 935408 08 6
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... of citizens. The polis walls serve an obvious defensive and protective purpose, but they also mark the frontier between citizens and enemies, the threshold between politics and the wild. Criminals had made themselves enemies of the state, so the Athenians cast their remains out of the city after execution, just as Londoners took the corpses of provincials ...

Route to Nowhere

Peter Mair: European parties of the Left, 4 January 2001

The Heart Beats on the Left 
by Oskar Lafontaine, translated by Ronald Taylor.
Polity, 219 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 7456 2582 7
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... with the much weaker East German currency being accorded parity with the strong West German mark. The immediate appeal of such a policy to East German voters was obvious, and the proposal was also supported by Brandt. In the longer term, however, as Lafontaine then argued, currency parity would lead to industry becoming uncompetitive in East ...

How do you spell Shakespeare?

Frank Kermode, 21 May 1987

William Shakespeare. The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1456 pp., £75, February 1987, 9780198129196
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William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1432 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 19 812926 2
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... the differences superior information can impose. This doesn’t mean that editors should simply mark up the texts of other editors, only that the scope for sensible change is less than it pleases them to believe. Bowers was right to warn his colleagues that the incredible refinement of bibliographical technique in our time might not succeed in making many ...

Feed the Charm

Adewale Maja-Pearce: Political violence in Africa, 25 July 2002

In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy 
by Ken Wiwa.
Black Swan, 320 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 552 99891 5
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This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis 
by Karl Maier.
Penguin, 327 pp., £9.99, February 2002, 0 14 029884 3
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The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War 
by Stephen Ellis.
Hurst, 350 pp., £40, November 1999, 1 85065 417 4
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... feature of the Liberian civil war, which lasted from December 1989 until the election of Charles Taylor as President in July 1997: Some people assert that fighters were encouraged to carry out such practices by their ritual specialists, while others may have simply improvised behaviour on the basis of a received belief that this would make them ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t ...

Our Boys

John Bayley, 28 November 1996

Emily Tennyson 
by Ann Thwaite.
Faber, 716 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 571 96554 7
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... out of Tennyson country into the land of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Elizabeth Taylor. Mutual marital embarrassment – how un-Victorian and un-Tennysonian – is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson ...

Grounds for Despair

John Dunn, 17 September 1981

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 252 pp., £24, July 1981, 0 7156 0933 5
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... of Hume and his successors. This might well be true. How human beings imagine themselves does mark very deeply the ways in which they try to live; and, even on the most alienated view, the ways in which they try to live have a large, if uneven impact on the ways in which they succeed in living. Cultural causality is certainly extravagantly ...

Play for Today

Adam Smyth: Rewriting ‘Pericles’, 24 October 2019

Spring 
by Ali Smith.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £16.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 20704 8
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The Porpoise 
by Mark Haddon.
Chatto, 309 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 1 78474 282 9
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... a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting elected. Gladstone ...

Clunk, Clack, Swish

Jon Day: Watching the Snooker, 8 February 2024

Unbreakable 
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Seven Dials, 262 pp., £22, May 2023, 978 1 3996 1001 8
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... Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked O’Sullivan, he paused for a moment then replied: ‘Barack Obama.’ O’Sullivan is widely acknowledged to be ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, ...

At the V&A

Marina Warner: Alexander McQueen, 4 June 2015

... and alarmed – the team at Givenchy in Paris when he arrived there, and his tailoring skills mark the wonderfully elegant suits and outfits on show in the first rooms of the exhibition. After Savile Row, he went to work for theatrical costumiers, and continued to take off into different eras and places, reprising Jacobite jabots, tartans and sashes (in ...

Not So Special

Richard J. Evans: Imitating Germany, 7 March 2024

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 
by David Blackbourn.
Liveright, 774 pp., £40, July 2023, 978 1 63149 183 2
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... Kocka, who saw the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 as the turning point when, as A.J.P. Taylor quipped, German history failed to turn. While in other Western and Central European nations industrialisation and the defeat of the landed aristocracy were accompanied by the triumph of bourgeois liberalism, in Germany aristocracy and authoritarianism ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... was voiced by Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: material abundance becomes a mark of status and so casts down the poor. Another is that commercialism excites a servile pandering to buyers. In 1766 the Charleston Tribune noted that ‘luxury naturally creates want, and that want, whether artificial or real, has a tendency to make men venal ...

A Young Woman Who Was Meant to Kill Herself

Jeremy Harding: Charlotte Salomon, 8 March 2018

Life? Or Theatre? 
by Charlotte Salomon.
Duckworth, 840 pp., £125, September 2017, 978 1 715 65247 0
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Charlotte 
by David Foenkinos, translated by Sam Taylor.
Canongate, 224 pp., £8.99, January 2018, 978 1 78211 796 4
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Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory 
by Griselda Pollock.
Yale, 542 pp., £45, March 2018, 978 0 300 10072 3
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Charlotte Salomon: ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ A Selection of 450 Gouaches 
by Judith Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch.
Taschen, 599 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 3 8365 7077 0
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... giving it the deceptive look of a long poem. The success of this approach, loyally managed by Sam Taylor in his translation, is to make Charlotte read as a series of ticker-tape bulletins, delivered in breathless fits and starts. At the entrance to L’Ermitage, something holds Charlotte back: It is a force behind her. She almost has the impression that her ...

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