What all men know – that Hitler wanted, intended and tried to annihilate the Jews of Europe – was something largely hidden from the Jews themselves until the job was far along. Hitler...

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Bandini to Hackmuth: John Fante

Christopher Tayler, 21 September 2000

Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the...

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We know both too much about Margaret Thatcher and too little. She was 20th-century Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister, and occupied the post for a longer continuous period than anyone...

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Blimey: James Stirling

Gillian Darley, 7 September 2000

The recently opened Gilbert Collection at Somerset House includes a vast number of objects made by a meticulous technique of inlay known as micromosaic, in which tiny fragments of glass are...

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Taking Flight: Blake Morrison

Thomas Jones, 7 September 2000

Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels...

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Recurring Women: Emily Dickinson

Danny Karlin, 24 August 2000

Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – (#788) Editing Emily Dickinson’s poetry is a problem which continues to vex literary scholars and textual critics;...

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British Chill: What E.H.Carr Got Right

Anatol Lieven, 24 August 2000

Three years after E.H. Carr’s death in 1982, Mikhail Gorbachev began the process which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, a development which at first sight...

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The Biggest Rockets: Gustav Mahler

Alex Ross, 24 August 2000

‘In thirty or forty years,’ Gustav Mahler is said to have said, ‘Beethoven’s symphonies will no longer be played in concerts. My symphonies will take their place.’...

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What’s this? A. Alvarez

Ian Sansom, 24 August 2000

‘Every critic,’ H.L. Mencken wrote in his notebooks, is in the position, so to speak, of God ... He can smite without being smitten. He challenges other men’s work, and is...

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Nation of Mutes: Marquis de Custine

Tony Wood, 24 August 2000

The Marquis de Custine is best known for La Russie en 1839, an eloquent account of his travels across European Russia and of the horrors and absurdities of the Russian autocracy. Born in 1790,...

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In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing.

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Tim Hilton’s foreword to the concluding volume of his biography of Ruskin is intimate and magisterial in a way that would seem presumptuous in anyone else. But Hilton has worked with Ruskin...

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Performing Seals: The PR Crowd

Christopher Hitchens, 10 August 2000

A man I met told me that F.R. Leavis had once been invited to Columbia University to talk, and was afterwards bidden to a reception in his own honour. The co-editor of Scrutiny had been very much...

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Models and Props: Caravaggio in the Studio

Nicholas Penny, 10 August 2000

Even before Caravaggio’s premature death in violent and mysterious circumstances in 1610, pictures influenced by his work were to be found in many different parts of Europe. There were...

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Fat is a manifest tissue: George Cheyne

Steven Shapin, 10 August 2000

Physicians have historically walked a fine line between expertise and common sense, between innovation and tradition. If what they said to their patients was unintelligible, they ran the risk of...

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Gaelic Gloom: Brian Moore

Colm Tóibín, 10 August 2000

In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s first novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned...

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Vlad the Impaler: Hairy Humbert

Inga Clendinnen, 10 August 2000

Ever since Lolita ignited the American literary scene in the late 1950s Vladimir Nabokov has been the most famous lepidopterist in the world – indeed, the only one most of us have ever heard of. The...

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Memories of Lindsay Anderson

Alan Bennett, 20 July 2000

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the area steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard...

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