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Water-Borne Zombies

Theo Tait: Jellyfish, 6 March 2014

Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean 
by Lisa-Ann Gershwin.
Chicago, 424 pp., £19.50, May 2013, 978 0 226 02010 5
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... Near the end​ of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller finds himself on a desolate beach in the distant future. Under a lurid red sky, by a slack, oily sea, he is set upon by giant crabs, last survivors in a dying world – ‘foul, slow-stirring monsters’, with ‘vast, ungainly claws smeared with an algal slime ...

So Amused

Sarah Rigby: Fay Weldon, 11 July 2002

Auto da Fay 
by Fay Weldon.
Flamingo, 366 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 9780007109920
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... Ford, Ezra Pound (who apparently had a habit of playing her piano with his nose when drunk), H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit, who, Weldon’s grandmother tells her, ‘was very excitable and . . . ran round the corridors at night screaming’. Meanwhile, Weldon attends a Scottish-influenced girls’ high school, reads Tolkien and Raymond Chandler and, on being told ...

New Unions for Old

Colin Kidd, 4 March 2021

The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Thought in Modern Scotland 
by Ben Jackson.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 1 108 79318 6
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Standing up for Scotland: Nationalist Unionism and Scottish Party Politics, 1884-2014 
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 258 pp., £80, May 2020, 978 1 4744 4781 2
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... of the cultural magazine Scottish International; and the Scots Fanonites Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull would apply Fanon’s insights about an internalised sense of inferiority to Scotland’s cravenly sub-metropolitan lettered classes (I was among those named and shamed).The unbending realities of first past the post politics crushed the SLP’s ...

Todd Almighty

Peter Medawar, 16 February 1984

A Time to Remember: The Autobiography of a Chemist 
by Alexander Todd.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 521 25593 7
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... model of our own. I believe the only two others who have won this double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of writing any such ...

Brave as hell

John Kerrigan, 21 June 1984

Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 160 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 09 156050 0
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Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Modern Edition 
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Macmillan, 311 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 333 36386 8
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... the ithyphallic poet. This argument, initially so appealing, collapsed under scrutiny. Stanley Wells observed that Forman’s manuscript read ‘brave’ not ‘brown’, John Carey crisply noted that, if Emilia was Italian, Rosaline was French, and Mary Edmond established the true name of Lanier’s husband: Alfonso. In the new text only ‘Will in ...

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath 
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2
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Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0
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... cleansing, in which some of the men refused to take part. Animals were slaughtered and thrown into wells to poison the water. Homes were burnt down. Prisoners were lined up on the bank of a ditch and shot. I took the book with me to Mogadishu, Somalia, and found that reading a chapter of summary soldiering in My Lai was a busman’s holiday after a day of ...

Oh for the oo tray

William Feaver: Edward Burra, 13 December 2007

Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye 
by Jane Stevenson.
Cape, 496 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 224 07875 7
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... of The Tea-Shop, 1929, one of Burra’s Naughtee Paree numbers, perfect for a Folio Society Ronald Firbank reprint, makes it to the dust jacket.) Pictures, it’s true, might distract from the commissioned narrative and, anyway, biographers of painters should avoid frisking pictures for personal disclosures. Yet of all 20th-century British ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... seniority and free to tack further right.‘In a strange way,’ he said, ‘the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for for the past few years.’ His own campaign for president, in 1988, was a dress rehearsal for the Third Way politics that would send Bill Clinton to the White ...

My Year of Reading Lemmishly

Jonathan Lethem, 10 February 2022

... SF is the tradition originating not in Mary Shelley’s gothic Frankenstein but rather in H.G. Wells’s technological prognostications. The Hard SF tradition likes Jules Verne, the predictor of submarines and holograms, but frowns at his fanciful plots. Standardised in the mid-century US, in Astounding magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, Hard SF ...

Lost Jokes

Alan Bennett, 2 August 1984

... England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud. I let him have it, and I think I must have got him in the wing because he ...

Heimat

David Craig, 6 July 1989

A Search for Scotland 
by R.F. Mackenzie.
Collins, 280 pp., £16.95, May 1989, 0 00 215185 5
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A Claim of Right for Scotland 
edited by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 202 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 7486 6022 4
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The Eclipse of Scottish Culture 
by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull.
Polygon, 121 pp., £6.95, May 1989, 0 7486 6000 3
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The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems 
by Kenneth White.
Mainstream, 239 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 1 85158 245 2
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Travels in the Drifting Dawn 
by Kenneth White.
Mainstream, 160 pp., £12.95, May 1989, 1 85158 240 1
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... the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ‘Utopia’. He read Shaw, Wells and Russell, and stopped saluting the laird (but not the doctor, the minister or the teacher) because he ‘contributed nothing to the community’ and wasn’t very intelligent: ‘There’s naething in him except what he puts in with a spoon.’ By ...
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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... supplications, administers the strap. Tearful Jakie runs away even as his father’s prayer wells up on the soundtrack. A decade or more passes. In a studio reconstruction of Coffee Dan’s, San Francisco show business hang-out of the era, Jolson makes his first appearance as the mature Jakie, now known as Jack Robin. The entire scene is redolent of his ...

Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 
by Patrick Collinson.
Oxford, 297 pp., £17.50, January 1983, 0 19 822685 3
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Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 
by John Morrill.
Macmillan, 257 pp., £14, November 1982, 0 333 27565 9
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The World of the Muggletonians 
by Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont.
Temple Smith, 195 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 0 85117 226 1
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The Life of John Milton 
by A.N. Wilson.
Oxford, 278 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 211776 9
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Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 8: 1666-1682 
edited by Maurice Kelley.
Yale, 625 pp., £55, January 1983, 0 300 02561 0
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The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Works of Andrew Marvell 
by Warren Chernaik.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 9780521247733
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... by Parliament for the liberties it claimed to defend. A similarly dispiriting picture emerges from Ronald Hutton’s excellent essay ‘The Royalist War Effort’, which bears some striking resemblances to his excellent book The Royalist War Effort: somehow the trailer has appeared after the film. These essays are mostly about the victims rather than the ...

The Ugly Revolution

Michael Rogin: Martin Luther King Jr, 10 May 2001

I May Not Get there with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr 
by Michael Eric Dyson.
Free Press, 404 pp., £15.99, May 2000, 0 684 86776 1
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The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Vol. IV: Symbol of the Movement January 1957-December 1958 
edited by Clayborne Carson et al.
California, 637 pp., £31.50, May 2000, 0 520 22231 8
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... death. Dyson’s book enters the fray over who gets to speak for the icon of Martin Luther King. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national holiday. There ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... not allegory.5 September, Mells. I knew about Mells from reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox and from all the First World War stuff which comes at the end of the first act of Forty Years On. The church closes off a short street of terraced houses which wouldn’t be remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like ...

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