Giles MacDonogh
On The Grapevine
Phylloxera: How Wine Was Saved For the World
By Christy Campbell
HarperCollins 314pp £17.99
I ONCE SPENT a memorable day at the home of Pierre Pagès, a respected restaurateur who had been born the son of a poor baker in the Cérvennes Mountains. We stopped in front of a luxuriant vine: 'Clinton!' he spat. 'You know, it was not vinegar they put on that sponge they passed up to Christ, it was Clinton!'
This was -a decade or so ago, when allusions to the controversial president of the United States were irresistible. Clinton vines had come to France from America along with Isabella and Noah - the grape that allegedly made hair grow on the palms of your hands. They were intimately linked
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
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