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Bumper Book of Death

Frank Kermode, 1 October 1981

The Hour of Our Death 
by Philippe Ariès, translated by Helen Weaver.
Allen Lane, 651 pp., £14.95, July 1981, 0 7139 1207 3
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... Later it was probably the fashion for personal monuments that led to intolerable overcrowding in urban graveyards, which had formerly been rather temporary places of deposit, the bones being removed later to an ossuary. In the 19th century people began to complain that the urban cemeteries were unhygienic. The great Paris ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises.Over the past twenty years, ranks of glass towers have risen up just south of the city’s old downtown. The second tallest building west ...

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4
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... without Walls, which is organised into sections on place, memory, blandness, ‘edgelands’ and urban regeneration, derives in one way or another from the TV programmes, but there are no photographs or screenshots. Some of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is ...

The Illiberal Hour

Mark Bonham-Carter, 7 March 1985

Black and White Britain: The Third Survey 
by Colin Brown.
PSI/Heinemann, 331 pp., £22.50, September 1984, 0 435 83124 0
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... suffered were easily discovered: they tended to live in poor, cramped conditions in central urban areas that were decaying. They were more likely to be homeless than other groups. Even in 1974 they were far more likely to be unemployed, partly because their knowledge of the English language was poor. These kinds of disadvantage can be divided into two ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than civilisation’ whose culture is threatened by a new urban music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s ...

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3
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... parklands under the safeguard of the Forestry Commission, the decree neatly epitomises the way urban societies have come to think of woodlands (and of wilderness more generally) as zones of quiet retreat that stand in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking ...

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Not all Scots, 3 June 2021

... minority. This group, Scotland’s middle-class professionals, already accustomed to urban life and relatively secure, began to take part in Britain’s most ambitious political and cultural schemes. Empire was one; the expansion of the state after World War Two was another. When these came to an end, it was the ‘hurricane survivors’ who bore ...

At the V&A

Rosemary Hill: Constable , 23 October 2014

... The late Graham Reynolds, keeper of the Department of Paintings, wrote the catalogue raisonné and Mark Evans, curator of this exhibition, was also responsible for John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum, which toured to the United States in 2012. But while that exhibition could be presented as offering an insight into the artist’s ...
England’s dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock 
by Jon Savage.
Faber, 602 pp., £17.50, October 1991, 0 571 13975 2
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... the way. Debbie Juvenile, Richard Hell, Howard Devoto, Poly Styrene, Stiv Bator, Lucy Toothpaste, Mark P, Joe Strummer, Steve Severin, Siouxsie Sioux, Tom Verlaine, Jordan, Sue Catwoman, Berlin: names to conjure with. And names which hang round the neck of stories less mythical perhaps but in their own ways all as interesting and sui generis as that of Sid ...

The Last Englishman to Rule India

Ashis Nandy: Jawaharlal Nehru, 21 May 1998

Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny 
by Stanley Wolpert.
Oxford, 546 pp., £25, January 1997, 0 19 510073 5
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... had clear antecedents in Indian tradition, but there was little cultural support, save among the urban, semi-Westernised élite, for the other ideas derived from the European Enlightenment. As a result, the modern ideology of the state quickly divided the political class into insider and outsiders. South Asia had its own political and communal traditions as ...

Whose Republican Front?

Jeremy Harding, 20 April 2017

... now, the FN has also lamented the decline of French industry and called for the cleansing of inner urban areas, as zones of misrule that need to be policed and brought to heel. It isn’t just one, but two disappearing worlds that the party celebrates and commemorates in a single, long exhalation. The elegy for an ...

Warming My Hands and Telling Lies

Dinah Birch, 3 August 1995

So I Am Glad 
by A.L. Kennedy.
Cape, 280 pp., £9.99, May 1995, 0 224 03974 1
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Now That You’re Back 
by A.L. Kennedy.
Vintage, 248 pp., £5.99, May 1995, 0 09 945711 3
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... in disputed circumstances, seems to have been a violent one. Like Jennifer, he is at odds with the urban life that has produced him. ‘I have always found it hard to believe in most things.’ He is contaminated by the traumas of others, crowded into a dirty city, deformed and energised by the ‘continual stare of its streets’. Kennedy makes de ...

Country Life

Christopher de Bellaigue: How to Farm, 21 April 2022

English Pastoral: An Inheritance 
by James Rebanks.
Penguin, 304 pp., £9.99, September 2021, 978 0 14 198257 1
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Field Work: What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land 
by Bella Bathurst.
Profile, 236 pp., £9.99, April, 978 1 78816 214 2
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... of art portraying or evoking country life, typically in a romanticised or idealised form for an urban audience’. In 1994, aged twenty, Rebanks too had a tiff with his father – a Cumbrian hill farmer – and went off to Australia. The farm where he spent nights making hay under tractor light confused him with its vastness. ‘Tens of thousands of sheep ...

A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque

Marina Warner: The monstrousness of Britart, 13 April 2000

High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s 
by Julian Stallabrass.
Verso, 342 pp., £22, December 1999, 1 85984 721 8
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This is Modern Art 
by Matthew Collings.
Weidenfeld, 270 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 297 84292 7
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... excoriates the artists’ nihilism, cynicism and tourist populism: he describes the ubiquity of urban decay, social ruination and personal degradation in their imagery as ‘urban pastoralism’, a late millennial equivalent of the rococo’s pleasure in swains and Bo-peeps frolicking in hayricks. ‘A pervasive and ...

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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... their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining Village’ – extends this anti-heroic narrative, though from the standpoint of a travel writer and a man of letters rather than, as in Beatrix Campbell’s case, that of embattled ...

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