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Stephen Sedley: The Supreme Court’s Judgment, 2 March 2017

... counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what even the sober Constitution Unit was calling the case of the century. Well, the appeal failed, and by a decisive margin of eight votes ...

The Depositor Haircut

James Meek: Cyprus’s Depositor Haircut, 9 May 2013

... moved €10.5 million to London a few days before the bank freeze (the company denies it had any prior knowledge). The superficial ideologies to which Cypriot presidents proclaim loyalty – communism, until recently; now, under Nicos Anastasiades, free market capitalism – mean less to Demetriou than the fact that Parliament has a solid majority of ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... fundamental unseriousness – though Blair enthusiastically remade the party in his own image prior to 1997, and the ferocity with which staffers at Labour HQ resisted Corbyn proves that control of the party matters to every faction. To control the party is to have the power to change the country. But for the project – showing its Bennite inheritance ...

Intelligent Theory

Frank Kermode, 7 October 1982

Figures of Literary Discourse 
by Gérard Genette, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Blackwell, 303 pp., £15, August 1982, 0 631 13089 6
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Theories of the Symbol 
by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Catherine Porter.
Blackwell, 302 pp., £15, July 1982, 0 631 10511 5
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The Breaking of the Vessels 
by Harold Bloom.
Chicago, 107 pp., £7, April 1982, 0 226 06043 8
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The Institution of Criticism 
by Peter Hohendahl.
Cornell, 287 pp., £14.74, June 1982, 0 8014 1325 7
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Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction 
by Ann Banfield.
Routledge, 340 pp., £15.95, June 1982, 0 7100 0905 4
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... incidentally, is to be believed when he speaks of the danger of cleverness in people lacking a prior disposition to temperate dealing.) What needs to be said now, I think, is that critics given to theoretical or methodological speculation are not necessarily, for that reason, stupid about the ‘data’, the works under consideration. It is the great, one ...

No Longer Merely the Man Who Ate His Boots

Thomas Jones: The Northwest Passage, 27 May 2010

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage 
by Glyn Williams.
Allen Lane, 440 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 84614 138 6
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Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation 
by Andrew Lambert.
Faber, 428 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 571 23160 7
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... that the land of the giants wasn’t really there. That changed with the voyages of Vitus Bering, James Cook and George Vancouver, who between 1728 and 1794 mapped out most of the west coast of Canada and Alaska. They were looking for a strait and an inland sea supposedly discovered by Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte in 1592 and 1640. Unfortunately, the ...

Diary

Ben Lerner: On Disliking Poetry, 18 June 2015

... English, in an anthology called Pegasus Descending, ‘a book of the best bad verse’, which, as James Wright put it, contained ‘nothing mediocre!’ To read abysmal poems is often hilarious, but there’s an element of idealism mixed into the hilarity: reading the worst poems is a way of feeling, albeit negatively, that echo of poetic possibility. Think ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Salmond v. Sturgeon, 1 April 2021

... by a determination to bring down Sturgeon.Three inquiries were set up into the Salmond affair. James Hamilton, a former director of public prosecutions in Ireland, has been investigating the possibility that Sturgeon breached the ministerial code, while Laura Dunlop’s review of the harassment complaints procedure has just reported (she recommended ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... Revolutionary Art’, which Rivera also signed. It finished with a flourish that recalled the prior conjoining of Marx and Rimbaud: ‘Our aims: The independence of art – for the revolution; The revolution – for the complete liberation of art.’ At least rhetorically, at least momentarily, aesthetic autonomy and political commitment were held ...

Dark Knight

Tom Shippey, 24 February 1994

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory 
by P.J.C. Field.
Boydell and Brewer, 218 pp., £29.50, September 1993, 0 85991 385 6
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... personal. Field notes Malory’s good luck in having a rich Crusader uncle in Sir Robert Malory, prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who led an English contingent against the Turks, 1435-8; but also his bad luck in having Uncle Robert die in 1440, before his nephew could profit from any nepotism. Personal injury, coupled with feelings of political ...

Fixing it for heredity

Raymond Fancher, 9 November 1989

The Burt Affair 
by Robert Joynson.
Routledge, 347 pp., £25, August 1989, 9780415010399
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... twin pair, including background on their foster homes, their degrees of contact with each other prior to the study, and even their photographs. Besides providing fascinating reading in their own right, these descriptions enable curious readers to probe considerably beyond the statistical summaries of results. For example, while the authors reported a ...

You see stars

Michael Wood, 19 June 1997

The House of Sleep 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 384 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 0 670 86458 7
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... stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau with Sid James and Kenneth Connor. But it is above all a novel of the Thatcher years, satirically seen as the reign of a particular mentality, easily identified, but not so easily defined. Coe portrays it through six grotesques, members of a single family, which itself is ...

Diary

Stephen Smith: In LA, 25 March 1993

... officers do you suppose were gunned down in the infamous ’hood of NWA during the thirty years prior to Burrell’s shooting? Would it be a hundred, an annual casualty tally of between three and four members of the LAPD? Does a thousand, a mortality rate of more than thirty of LA’s finest per annum, sound too high? The truly staggering answer is that the ...

Without Map or Compass

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott: Brexit and the Constitution, 24 May 2018

... has heard only a handful of cases in which it pronounced on the legality of devolved legislation prior to its becoming law. However, in at least a couple of Welsh cases it has upheld the legality of devolved legislation. The Supreme Court’s last (and, so far, only) Brexit case, Miller v. Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, was decidedly not a victory ...

No Escape

Bruce Robbins: Culture, 1 November 2001

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress 
edited by Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison.
Basic Books, 384 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 0 465 03176 5
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Culture/Metaculture 
by Francis Mulhern.
Routledge, 198 pp., £8.99, March 2000, 0 415 10230 8
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Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account 
by Adam Kuper.
Harvard, 299 pp., £12.50, November 2000, 0 674 00417 5
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... Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently expository, sounding like a veteran crowd-pleasing lecturer who assumes little ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...

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