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Beast of a Nation

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland’s Self-Pity, 31 October 2002

Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland 
by Neal Ascherson.
Granta, 305 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 1 86207 524 7
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... to another, which can become a fairly gentle way of describing your own personal history, too. John Smith, the late Labour leader, believed a devolved Scottish parliament was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. He died too young and is buried now on the Isle of Iona, in what is thought to have been the graveyard of the Scottish kings. There’s ...

Gaelic Communist

Graham Walker, 12 October 1989

James Connolly: A Political Biography 
by Austen Morgan.
Manchester, 244 pp., £9.95, October 1989, 0 7190 2958 9
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James Connolly: Selected Writings 
edited by P. Beresford Ellis.
Pluto, 256 pp., £8.95, April 1988, 9780745302676
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... who see Connolly’s socialism as evolving out of his Catholicism. Similarly, the arguments of John Newsinger deserve notice: he, like Morgan, believes that Connolly was not in any meaningful sense a Catholic for a long period, but that he nonetheless consciously cultivated a ‘safe’ religious position in order not to alienate the mass of Irish ...

Raiding Joyce

Denis Donoghue, 18 April 1985

James Joyce 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £20, November 1984, 9780521240147
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James Joyce and Sexuality 
by Richard Brown.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £19.50, March 1985, 0 521 24811 6
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Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation 
by Fritz Senn, edited by John Paul Riquelme.
Johns Hopkins, 225 pp., £22.20, December 1984, 0 8018 3135 0
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Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French 
edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780521266369
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... through the lore and literature available to Joyce: Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Freud, Have-lock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Charles Albert, Otto Weininger, and many other rhetoricians of sex. The lore is informative, though it is bound to excite the reader into thinking that Joyce was permanently retarded in the matter of sexuality. Brown has a phrase or two from ...

Leur Pays

David Kennedy: Race, immigration and democracy in America, 22 February 2001

Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy 
by Desmond King.
Harvard, 388 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 674 00088 9
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... by discriminating against the new immigrant groups who had teemed through Castle Garden and Ellis Island in the preceding generation. The terms of the 1924 statute allocated some 70 per cent of visas to the second-wave countries of Britain, Ireland and Germany, while Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union – the major nurseries of the third wave’s new ...

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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... with a naturalistic account of sex and sexual pleasure that there was in France. The radical John Wilkes’s venture into sexual literature is so marginal that it doesn’t figure here at all; the conflation of liberty and libertinage in Don Giovanni’s famous aria would have fallen on uncomprehending ears. We do not quite know, as Porter and Hall point ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... able legally to control her own money (which the Littlewoods managed), she sold the film rights to John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s production company for the very substantial sum of £20,000 (the equivalent of around half a million pounds today).In September 1960 Richardson directed a production of A Taste of Honey in Los Angeles; in October it ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
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... in the 1890s at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Berlin, and his short story ‘The Coming of John’ features an episode in which the protagonist is intoxicated by a performance of Lohengrin. This rapturous feeling is only shattered when a white childhood friend arrives and asks him to vacate his seat – an experience that Du Bois compared to the Veil ...

Predatory Sex Aliens

Gary Indiana: Burroughs, 8 May 2014

Call Me Burroughs: A Life 
by Barry Miles.
Twelve, 718 pp., £17, January 2014, 978 1 4555 1195 2
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... of American writers have accomplished something original with the novel form in his wake – John Hawkes, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Renata Adler, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin come to mind – but innovative narrative fiction has enjoyed far greater support from publishers and readers in ...

Small Crocus, Big Kick

Daniel Soar: Jeffrey Eugenides, 3 October 2002

Middlesex 
by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Bloomsbury, 529 pp., £16.99, October 2002, 0 7475 6023 4
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... a whiff of nationality as Desdemona escapes by boat with Lefty from the fires of Smyrna to Ellis Island. ‘Lying on her back with her eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of ...

I was there to inflict death

Christian Lorentzen: Cormac McCarthy’s Powers, 5 January 2023

The Passenger 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 381 pp., £20, October, 978 0 330 45742 2
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Stella Maris 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 190 pp., £20, December, 978 0 330 45744 6
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... When a teenage Bobby traced the clan’s origins to a Jewish woman from Romania who arrived at Ellis Island in 1848, their antisemitic great-uncle tried to kick him out of the house. None of this explains why the siblings are so weird. Explanation isn’t the business of these novels. The siblings’ backstory is doled out across The Passenger and ...

Bravo, old sport

Christopher Hitchens, 4 April 1991

Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-War America 
by Neil Jumonville.
California, 291 pp., £24.95, January 1991, 0 520 06858 0
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... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen: The Sorrows of DFW, 11 October 2012

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 
by D.T. Max.
Granta, 352 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84708 494 1
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... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression ...

Fade to Greige

Elaine Showalter: Mad for the Handcuff Bracelets, 4 January 2001

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion 
by Holly Brubach.
Phaidon, 232 pp., £19.95, October 1999, 9780714838878
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Fashion Today 
by Colin McDowell.
Phaidon, 511 pp., £39.95, September 2000, 0 7148 3897 7
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Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender and Society in Clothing 
by Diana Crane.
Chicago, 294 pp., £19, August 2000, 0 226 11798 7
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Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries 
by Avril Hart and Susan North.
Victoria & Albert Museum, 223 pp., £19.95, October 2000, 1 85177 258 8
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Don We Now Our Gay Appalrel: Gay Men’s Dress in the 20th Century 
by Shuan Cole.
Berg, 224 pp., £42.99, September 2000, 1 85973 415 4
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The Gallery of Fashion 
by Aileen Ribeiro.
Princeton, 256 pp., £60, November 2000, 0 691 05092 9
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Giorgio Armani 
by Germano Celant and Harold Koda.
Abrams, 392 pp., £40, October 2000, 0 8109 6927 0
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... exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the curator (and editor of Fashion Theory), points out. ‘Only very recently have they become aware that to ...

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
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Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
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... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...

Body Parts

Lawrence Stone, 24 November 1994

The Making of Victorian Sexuality 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 338 pp., £17.95, April 1994, 0 19 812247 0
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The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 256 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 19 812292 6
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... culturally and psychologically, about every aspect of sex. The process culminated in Havelock Ellis and Freud in the 19th century, and in Masters and Johnson and their imitators in the 20th. Foucault was a philosopher who knew little history, so he read scientific texts and paid scant attention to the enormous weight of evidence supporting the theory that ...

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