Reviews
Long essays on new books, twice a month
Etta Shiber’s account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris shows a vivid domestic world seldom seen in comparable memoirs. She describes the depredations and injustices of the Occupation, not least the looting of apartments by the Nazis. She recounts the parting shot of one angry French worker to the…
The point about the microphone as a visual aid is a minor one. Behind it lies a more fundamental question. What does the thing exist to do? Sometimes the significance of a device becomes fully apparent only when read against the grain of the history of its technical development.
Schoenberg looked backward and forward. In his commitment to perpetuating the Austro-German canon, he drew on the compositional techniques of his predecessors: the counterpoint of Bach, the classical forms of Mozart, the motivic working of Brahms, the tonal expansion of Wagner. And he…
We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more than anger in the key of helplessness. Outrage leads nowhere; violence freezes time for the victim; self-hatred paralyses every other emotion. These are all problems for a long…
‘What people eat and how they serve it’ fascinated Colwin, and not only because (as she once noted) she’d learned about the cultural significance of ‘daily things’ in Anthropology 101. Her sharp and nuanced descriptions of eating, preparing and shopping for meals are psychologically and socially…
Over the course of 24 novels and 87 years, Anita Brookner achieved many dislocations of selfhood and may have become more and more like the people she dreamed into life. It’s a novelist’s fate, not so much that their characters are like them but that they become their characters.
‘Almost everything is imitation,’ Voltaire wrote in one of the French editions of Lettres philosophiques. Books were like a borrowed flame: ‘We go to a neighbour to get the embers, light the fire when we return home and then pass it on to others; it belongs to everyone.’ For the truffle-hunting…
In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It is our national and/or racial identity that is being fractured. What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the ‘people of England’ are, as it were, a settled…
Classical Athens was a polis, but so was a tiny Arcadian town such as Orchomenos. In the second century AD, the obscure hamlet of Naryka petitioned the Emperor Hadrian to agree it was a polis, offering as proof its institutions and its mythical past as the supposed birthplace of the lesser Ajax in…
Academic life is full of churn. The world changes; younger scholars are seized by new questions and, as they hare down new paths, challenge their elders’ work or leave them behind. Those elders might read that as the decline of ‘standards’ but it really isn’t; it’s just the decline of their own…
The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several…
For the Kims, nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; they are an insurance policy against attack by their powerful and proximate enemies. Until about seven years ago, North Korea repeatedly showed its willingness to trade its nuclear arsenal for convincing US security guarantees…
