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Top-Drawer in Geneva

Michael Wood, 30 November 1995

Belle du Seigneur 
by Albert Cohen, translated by David Coward.
Viking, 974 pp., £20, November 1995, 9780670821877
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... without choosing and without arguing.’ Proust’s principle is admirable, but he hadn’t read Albert Cohen, parts of whose Belle du Seigneur are so mawkishly terrible you wonder why the publishers haven’t folded from embarrassment, while other parts are brilliantly, minutely observed, mercilessly funny, a parade of social and moral dissections that ...

Happy Campers

Ellen Meiksins Wood: G.A. Cohen, 28 January 2010

Why Not Socialism? 
by G.A. Cohen.
Princeton, 83 pp., £10.95, September 2009, 978 0 691 14361 3
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... Socialism’, Albert Einstein said, is humanity’s attempt ‘to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development’, and for G.A. Cohen ‘every market … is a system of predation.’ That is the essence of his short but trenchant and elegantly written last book – Cohen died last August ...

Drama of the Gowns

Lisa Cohen, 22 April 2021

Patch Work: A Life amongst Clothes 
by Claire Wilcox.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 1 5266 1439 1
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... A series of meditations on her work as curator of clothing and textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Patch Work is both a reverie and a valorisation of close observation, an eccentric personal catalogue and an oblique entry in the history of the V&A. ‘To provide a convincing display,’ she writes of a collective curatorial effort, ‘we group ...

How so very dear

Joshua Cohen: Ben Marcus, 21 June 2012

The Flame Alphabet: A Novel 
by Ben Marcus.
Granta, 289 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84708 622 8
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... a condiment, but as ‘an item that comprises the inner and outer core of most to all animals’. Albert isn’t the husband as much as a noun meaning ‘nightly killer of light’. Jennifer, whether the wife or not, is also ‘the inability to see’. The Age of Wire and String proved influential, especially within a creative writing establishment eager to ...

Amerikanist Dreams

Owen Hatherley, 21 October 2021

Building a New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture 
by Jean-Louis Cohen.
Yale, 544 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 300 24815 9
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Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital 
by Katherine Zubovich.
Princeton, 280 pp., £34, January, 978 0 691 17890 5
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... public esteem for this sort of historicist architecture was at its lowest. The cover of Jean-Louis Cohen’s book on Soviet ‘Amerikanizm’ features an image by Kazimir Malevich of the New York skyline circa 1920. The Singer Building and the similarly ‘Tartarian’ Woolworth Building are both visible, but montaged carefully into the foreground is an ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... on the page. ‘You are the only one who talked about me as I would have wished,’ the novelist Albert Cohen told him. It was a charmed life, particularly for a Jew who’d spent his youth on the run from the Gestapo and the collaborationist Milice. But the war never really ended for Lanzmann. Seventy-five thousand Jews were deported by ...

Mend and Extend

Jonathan Rée: Ernst Cassirer’s Curiosity, 18 November 2021

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 
by Ernst Cassirer, translated by Steve G. Lofts.
Routledge, 1412 pp., £150, September 2020, 978 1 138 90725 6
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... and an epitaph. Rather like the political initiatives of his contemporaries Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, Cassirer’s book owed its clout to the intellectual capital he had built up outside politics. But his intervention, unlike theirs, drew on the theoretical work that had made him famous. He practised philosophy in a style that was going out of ...

Lemon and Pink

David Trotter: The Sorrows of Young Ford, 1 June 2000

Return to Yesterday 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Bill Hutchings.
Carcanet, 330 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 397 1
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War Prose 
by Ford Madox Ford, edited by Max Saunders.
Carcanet, 276 pp., £14.95, August 1999, 1 85754 396 3
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... old for frontline duty, and soon found himself with the battalion transport in Bécourt Wood, near Albert. On 28 or 29 July, a shell exploded beside him, and he lost his memory. In the Casualty Clearing station at Corbie, he hallucinated a congregation of immense shapes in grey-white cagoules. The shapes, with their grey-whiteness and their ‘dreadful ...

Diary

Sheila Fitzpatrick: File-Selves, 22 September 2022

... a whole 400-page book on the Soviet internal passport, which is what the Russian anthropologist Albert Baiburin has done.* A professor at the European University at St Petersburg, trained at the great semiotic centre in Tartu (Soviet Estonia) in the 1970s, Baiburin came to this topic through a general interest in symbolism and ritual. His book is ...

Aids and the Polio Vaccine

Edward Hooper: New evidence, 3 April 2003

... oral polio vaccine to be amplified locally, in labs around the world. Some virologists, including Albert Sabin, whose sugar lump OPV was adopted for use the world over, acknowledged this fact in their publications. Others, including makers of CHAT vaccine, did not. However, the papers written about vaccinations in Poland in 1959-60 by collaborators of the ...

I’m a Surfer

Steven Shapin: What’s the Genome Worth?, 20 March 2008

A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life 
by Craig Venter.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, October 2007, 978 0 7139 9724 8
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... at the University of California, San Francisco. Working with the Stanford geneticist Stanley Cohen, Boyer had helped to develop some elegant recombinant DNA technologies which immediately suggested enormous value to the pharmaceutical industry. As was normal at the time, intellectual property rights were assigned to the universities, from the licensing ...

October!

John Lloyd, 21 October 1993

... in no position to do so. A war hero himself, Rutskoi was surrounded by harder men still. General Albert Makashov, a Stalinist who had challenged Yeltsin for the Presidency back in 1991, was a senior commander. General Vladimir Achalov, who had been ready, as one of the few unequivocally pro-Putschist commanders, to attack the White House in 1991, was the ...

Agh, Agh, Yah, Boo

David Wheatley: Ian Hamilton Finlay, 4 December 2014

Midway: Letters from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Stephen Bann, 1964-69 
edited by Stephen Bann.
Wilmington Square, 426 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 1 905524 34 1
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... only exhausted but somehow furious at all such people’. Anathemas were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and R.B. Kitaj ‘one of the very worst painters of the century’. When words were insufficient, Finlay’s indignation broke out in truncated sound poems ...

Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel

Charles Glass: Palestine, 7 June 2001

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate 
by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman.
Little, Brown, 612 pp., £25, January 2001, 0 316 64859 0
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Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48 
by Naomi Shepherd.
Murray, 290 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 7195 6322 4
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... to hold onto their gains in Turkey, Balfour addressed a predominantly Jewish audience at the Albert Hall in London. He reminded them that Britain had freed the Arabs ‘from the tyranny of their brutal conqueror’ – Turkey – during the Great War. ‘I hope,’ he went on, ‘that, remembering all that, they will not grudge that small notch – for ...

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me 
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1
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... lit, but the space around him was black. He could easily have been someone’s answer to Leonard Cohen, the songwriter as lonely, fucked-up guy. He looked like a recluse, introspective, overeducated; his voice sounded weird, the accent fake American. At the time, it took me ages to work out that the opening two words of ‘Border Song’ were ‘Holy ...

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