The bibliography of bullfighting is extensive and is littered with distinguished names: Lorca, Ortega y Gasset, Bergamin representing what one might call the home team; Hemingway, Tynan, François Zumbhiel from outside the Hispanic world. Placed alongside these, A L Kennedy’s contribution is modest, as she herself hints with a self-deprecating disclaimer in the opening chapter. […]
In an interview a few years ago I asked René Huyghe, Chief Curator of the Louvre in the Vichy years, exactly how he would define those in the French art world who had collaborated. Without hesitation he said that the collaborators had been the ones who had knowingly used the wartime situation to advance their […]
Blackberry Wine is going to appeal to all sorts of people: gardeners; owners of second homes in France; cooks and (in particular) people who brew their own beer; gourmets and the greedy; astrologers; aromatherapists; hypnotherapists; counsellors – all those innocent, artless souls who can’t quite cope with today’s demanding and rational world. If you are […]
Lewis Carroll lurks behind and between the lines of Kate Atkinson’s third novel, Emotionally Weird. His influence is evident in several of the characters, which include one ‘small as a dormouse and almost entirely spherical’, and in the dialogue, which is peppered sneezily with Carroll-like observations: ‘“everything’s got a moral,” I said, “if only you […]
One test of a good or interesting critic is the ability to make one look afresh at a piece of writing that one knows – or thinks one knows – like the back of one’s hand. Very often this is achieved by pointing out something so obvious that one is left feeling stunned at one’s […]
It seems to me that of all the persons elevated to sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church, Joan of Arc must be one of the least worthy, unless you count among the saintly virtues courage, charisma, chutzpah, patriotic fervour and tactical military intuition. It is true that she was a lifelong virgin, a step towards […]
Catherine Millet is the girl who can’t say ‘non’. Editor of the highly-regarded Art Press, she has made it her life’s work to sleep with as many men as possible (she has always, she says, had a thing about numbers). Millet’s previous book was a scholarly study of contemporary art. This one is an equally […]
Mirka Zemanova’s biography of Janacek is a painstaking account of a painful and unglamorous life. Zemanova has thoroughly researched the sources, and is scrupulously fair towards her subject, who, it has to be said, comes off as a result rather badly. Indeed, the reader is struck by the extraordinary dissonance between the composer and the […]
Like the roll of flame-coloured silk given to Olivia Curtis on her seventeenth birthday and soon after transformed into a dress for her first dance, Rosamond Lehmann’s novel Invitation to the Waltz is high-keyed and intense. It charts a rite of passage. Although confined to only one week, the book ends with Olivia replete with […]
This provoking short book about aspects of George Orwell – provoking in both senses, as its author might say – sits somewhat uneasily in the territory between polemic, personal memoir, thesis and biography. It is not helped by a mysterious title. What exactly is Orwell’s Victory? Christopher Hitchens never tells us in so many words. […]
When the Crown Prince of Nepal shot dead nearly his entire family last June, one journalist described it to me as the first genuine news event she could remember. September 11 was yet to come. Since I had written about India, and with India being close to Nepal, it was suggested that I might go […]
Here at last is a fascinating and compellingly readable but also scholarly and crisply written biography of the brutal, debauched and brilliant tsar who formed modern Russia. Lindsey Hughes, Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic Studies, is our greatest living expert on the life of Peter the Great. In many ways she […]
It is only to be expected that the Queen, in her Golden Jubilee year, should enjoy the publication of a biography or two to commemorate her feat, especially since the music industry has decided more or less to ignore the whole event. There will be a couple of anti-Jubilee songs – one by Billy Bragg […]
Some years ago, in a non-fiction study (titled Deadlier than the Male), I attempted to find out why respectable English women novelists were and still are so good at writing about crime. I concluded that those who choose the genre have several shared characteristics, including an extreme reluctance to make any public exposure of their […]
After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín’s third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the terrain of the disappeared and the shadowy. It was an enigmatic work, which left a vapour-trail of apprehension in the reader’s mind. […]
Long ago, before the land mass divided, a great forest stretched from Brittany to Cornwall. The haunt of wild beasts and the untamed men of ancient folklore, it was also a realm of secrets and enchantment. According to legend, the Holy Grail was buried there, and the magician Merlin was bound forever inside an oak […]
Because Thackeray was a brave man and a great writer, it is possible to overlook the fact that his life was a tragedy. D J Taylor’s brilliant new biography, however, captures the essence of that tragedy. Let’s hope it will also alert a new generation to Thackeray’s genius. When we think of tragic heroes, we […]
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Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
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