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Index: Books & Publishing

· Karl Marx and the eternal sunshine of the communist mind.

Monday, 11 April 2011

Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history.

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· Ink-stained hippie wretches and their far-out newspapers.

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

The medium has changed (from small magazines, to cheaply printed local community newspapers to Twitter), but the message is the same: Social movements need organic forms of communication because without it, they die.

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· Want to improve your quality of life? Get a better writer.

Saturday, 2 April 2011

The truth of a life is often far more interesting, often because it flies in the face of known facts and delivers to us a man (or woman, of course) a reader would like to believe in.

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· ‘Victorian sex’: Not your great-great-grandfather’s oxymoron.

Thursday, 24 March 2011

All the protagonists are male, with the women reduced to mere quickly potted biographies. The book leaves the “new eroticism” as a masculine invention. It’s one tryst after another, one flagellation after the next.

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· Lionel Trilling’s bright lights, big city, mutated people.

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

“Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Trilling said, that with the emergence of society, “something like a mutation in human nature took place.”

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· Nine books on ‘quakes that will fall off your shelves.

Monday, 14 March 2011

For as long as we have experienced seismicity, we have written about it, going back to the Book of Acts.

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All wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

Jesse Mullins: The American frontier forged American character. It might not be going too far to say that the appearance of the cowboy in the late 1800s marked the culmination of the protracted process that yielded the quintessentially American character.

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For Marvell, think Bernie Sanders with a growing ‘vegetable love’.

Sunday, 6 March 2011

Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure.

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· Newman’s quiet canonisation: no stigmata, please. We’re British.

Saturday, 5 March 2011

A study which, from its rueful opening anecdote about Cornwell’s first visit as a seminarian to Newman’s then very quiet grave, strives to paint a full and fair picture of an extremely talented, driven, passionate human being.

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· Stephen Fry, with no paper, ink, binding, or covers? You pay twice for that.

Thursday, 3 March 2011

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) last month launched a similar probe into the prices of ebooks, which can cost more than twice as much as their printed cousins.

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Bly in prose: the song of the body, the memory of rhythm.

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Myra Sklarew: The Bly of Reaching Out to the World is a presence, a powerful force, all hints and subtleties gathered up into an enormous bouquet that he and his speaker offer to the world.

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Poetry from a rock-hard place.

Monday, 28 February 2011

Edgar Mason: This is a valiant first round by Hobblebush Books. The packaging of both titles is quite fine, and great care has been exercised in the selection of both poets and the poems on display.

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Germany’s Orientalism express and the dream of global jihad.

Friday, 18 February 2011

The Berlin-to-Baghdad railway: Who can speak with confidence of Max von Oppenheim, the godfather of German “Orientalism” and a sponsor of holy war?

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Connecting Proust’s madeleine to Lenny Bruce’s ‘memoir-rant’.

Saturday, 12 February 2011

Writers began framing their autobiographies, selecting experiences that would contribute to an overall narrative shape of their choosing. The resulting books were as much studies of memory and memory’s mishaps and strangenesses as they were records of lives.

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William Carlos Williams’ biographer turns his attention to a poet named ‘R’.

Friday, 11 February 2011

For Whittemore, selecting Williams as a biographical subject, set a tone for his own memoir. With biographical subjects, issues of transference can be crucial, especially if the life of the subject resonates with aspects of one’s own personal life.

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