-
-
Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease swipe right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix prose poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
Departments
-
Contact the Editors here.
-
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
Subscribe
0 Comments
Our closet imperialists.
A Fortnightly Review of
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
John Darwin
Allen Lane | 496 pages | £25
By Michael Blackburn.
IT’S NOT UNUSUAL for reviewers to reveal something far more disagreeable about themselves than about the book at hand. Take for example the excuse for analysis occasioned by John Darwin’s new book, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain.
For many on the Left, the Empire has left an indelible residue which can only be erased by the application of shame. In that scouring spirit, a couple of the book’s PC critics have worked out why the British electorate has such a visceral dislike of the EU: it’s because they’re secret imperialists, hankering for the days of the Empire.
Linda Colley, reviewing Darwin’s book in the Guardian, makes the following claim:
John Naughton, a propos of Cameron’s proposals for a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, comes to much the same conclusion on his blog:
It seems we have a new meme in action here. It’s a useful one, combining two progressive obsessions: the guilt-inducing awfulness of the British Empire and the unimpeachable righteousness of the European Union. That makes another great stick with which to bash Britain.
For Colley, our past has affected our national DNA so much it has made us into an incorrigibly imperialist nation, fretting at the civilizing constraints of the great European project. We need cutting down to size and should forget about those things that made us global actors in the past.
Naughton confesses that “as an Irishman” he finds the British attitude to the EU “slightly comical”:
Yes, Ireland escaped one empire only to jump back into another one less than a century later, one in which it has less say than in its predecessor as to its own fate. During the whole time of its independence from Britain it was governed by gombeens and crooks. Now it’s governed by gombeens and crooks who take their orders from the EU and its bankers. And the EU is an empire they can never get out of.
SO, TO FOLLOW Colley’s logic, if Britain’s DNA has been altered by Empire to make the British resentful of being dominated, then Ireland’s, unfortunately, has suffered the opposite and produced a nation of forelock-tugging serfs. That’s what you get for wanting to be “just another country”. Naughton may find the British resentment of the legalistic tyranny of the EU comical, but we may be entitled to view his countrymen’s eagerness to surrender their sovereignty as ignominious and sad.
It’s telling, of course, that neither Colley nor Naughton admit the imperial dimension of the EU itself, a dimension openly acknowledged by the Commission’s oily president, Mr Barroso. That would rather spoil their argument. Fortunately, that argument leaves this book untouched – and perhaps unopened.
♦
Michael Blackburn is the Fortnightly’s Currente Calamo columnist as well as a poet, an occasional publisher (founding editor of Sunk Island Publishing) and a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln (UK).
Related
Publication: Monday, 28 January 2013, at 14:42.
Options: Archive for Michael Blackburn. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.