In October 1838, four months after Victoria’s coronation, shocking news filtered back to England from West Africa. Letitia Landon, once hailed as Byron’s poetic heir, was dead. The empty bottle of prussic acid clasped in her hand pointed to suicide. A sense of self-preservation prompted Dr Anthony Thomson, the bottle’s supplier, to suggest murder. Wasn’t […]
Emma Smith and Andrew McConnell Stott both introduce their books by acknowledging that not everyone enjoys Shakespeare. Smith announces at the start of This Is Shakespeare that she
Faber & Faber, the publishing company founded by my grandfather Geoffrey, is ninety this year. I’ve been lecturing on its history, mainly to Arts Society groups around the UK, for a few years now. Excellent design has always been central to Faber’s publishing philosophy, so book covers have provided the necessary artistic hook, while also […]
Born in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, she worked for a further two years (1944-46) with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria. She held the […]
What do we mean by calling an artist ‘a primitive’? Leonard Adam, writing on the subject in 1940, quotes G A Stevens: Primitive art is the most pure, most sincere form of art there can be, partly because it is deeply inspired by religious ideas and spiritual experience, and partly because it is entirely unselfconscious […]
The Tidy House is an elaborate and absorbing account of the way three eight-year-old working-class girls wrote a story in the long hot summer of 1976; why they wrote it, how they wrote it and what it meant to them. Carolyn Steedman was their class teacher. Although she tries hard to keep her book as […]
Shortly before Christmas 1996, six people working for the International Committee of the Red Cross were shot dead in their beds in Chechnya. The turnout at their funeral in Geneva’s St-Pierre Cathedral was vast; and so was the sense of shock. For almost the first time in the history of the Red Cross its delegates, […]
This is a series of thirteen essays designed to bring before the general reader the fruits of the latest research on medieval warfare. After half a dozen chapters, laid out chronologically from the Carolingians in France to the end of the Hundred Years War (with a brief coda on the years 1453–1526), the book switches […]
At the end of the long history of European imperialism a strange flotsam of white survivors remains in small forgotten communities throughout the globe. Some, like the Baasters of Namibia and the Burghers of Sri Lanka, are descendants of the first conquerors; others, like the Poles of Haiti or the Germans of Jamaica, are relics […]
French philosophical culture is saturated with the idea of le néant, not-being or nullity, conceived not as mere absence or failure to exist but as a positive force of nothingness on which other things can be predicated. We can see it in Sartre’s famous remark that, if Pierre is not present, ‘the absence of Pierre […]
There is a kind of television documentary that relies heavily on invented dialogue to convey information without the use of a narrator. This can work well for that medium. But there is also a kind of book that uses the same device when dealing with historical figures, without any justification at all. The Man Who […]
The march of mind discredited magic, and even the study of its history was long thought rather infra dig. The grand systematising works produced by Victorian polymaths — notably Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which first appeared in 1890 — became embarrassing dinosaurs. They were exposed by modern anthropologists as naively over-ambitious, bent on reducing […]
Empires are usually travesties of home. On every frontier you can sense the tension: on the one hand, the ‘frontier effect’ draws restless spirits, rebels, outcasts and escapees to open a new kind of society, unfenced or utopian. On the other, cultural baggage piles up: people crave the comforts and recreate the ways of home. […]
THOUGH ESSENTIALLY un homme sérieux, I have, as is widely known, from time to time engaged myself in the act of humorous composition. The light-hearted essay containing the jocular (and occasionally waspish!) aperçu has long been a forte of mine, and the list of my contributions to Punch magazine in my Who’s Who entry – […]
It is difficult not to feel that he was a bit of an old rogue,’ Alan Judd confesses about his impressions of Ford Madox Ford. Given the material in this biography one can only agree. Ford was an incorrigible philanderer who charmed a succession of women by his urbanity and humour, and his eccentric yet […]
Some novels are hard to review, some are easy. Some are so difficult you don’t know where to begin…but, then, a gift: the author saves you the trouble by more or less reviewing the book for you. So here’s how Iain Sinclair (via one of the peripheral characters, to his narrator) sums up Landor’s Tower: […]
It is over fifty years now since Eliot saw in literary criticism ‘a place for quiet, cooperative labour’. In the course of the last year 14 people from the University of Kent, interested in the Victorian novel, sought to put Eliot’s precept into practice by writing a book which, though containing chapters by individuals, would […]
Simple, uncomplicated loathing, like fine wine and expensive cigars, is one of the unexpected pleasures of middle age. It is often purely visceral — an instinctive and unreasoning dislike of a gesture, a turn of phrase, or a point of view — but it is rare to feel such confidence in your dislike as you […]
Hyland’s journey begins and ends in ‘crumbly old layer-cake Lisbon’, and in between he follows the Tagus, lingering over whatever real or metaphorical tributary takes his fancy. When he crosses the river, to Cacilhas, it is a literal rite of passage.
Traditional university teaching in the United States used to include a compulsory course on the history of Western civilisation, starting with the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and proceeding by weekly instalments to the most recent technological triumphs of American genius. This was the staple food of first-year students. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, an Oxford academic with an appetite […]
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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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