Prefaces to Shakespeare
Tony Tanner was the greatest talker of all the literary critics I have known. His hands working like a virtuoso conductor, he would keep five or six thoughts in the air, quoting, confiding, denouncing...
View ArticleClaude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory
Between his own publication of Tristes tropiques in 1955 and Jacques Derrida's publication of De la grammatologie in 1967, Claude Lévi-Strauss bestrode western humanities and social sciences as no one...
View ArticleGreen's Dictionary of Slang
Green's Dictionary of Slang (in three volumes)Jonathon GreenChambers, 6,085pp, £295Jonathon Green is a hack, perhaps the greatest hack of my generation. After a period at Oxford noted more for its...
View ArticleBento's Sketchbook
The word "sketch" entered the English language from the Dutch towards the end of the 17th century. From the beginning, it had two meanings: a brief description in words, or the outline of a picture....
View ArticleCitizen Cannes: the Man Behind the Cannes Festival
Citizen Cannes: the Man Behind the Cannes FestivalGilles JacobPhaidon, 384pp, £19.95The first Cannes film festival was planned for the autumn of 1939. It was explicitly designed as a democratic...
View ArticleA tale of two theories
Sacked by Cambridge University amid accusations of heroin-dealing and terrorist links, he became tIt is three decades since, in the summer of 1981, I "came down" from Cambridge after 14 years, having...
View ArticleThe finest flower of comparative philology
Saussure - review.Saussure John E JosephOxford University Press, 800pp, £30In 1906, the University of Geneva was faced, at very short notice, with the task of filling its chair of general linguistics....
View ArticleSalman Rushdie versus the mullocracy
Colin MacCabe reviews "Joseph Anton: a Memoir".Joseph Anton: a Memoir Salman RushdieJonathan Cape, 656pp, £25The first policeman would arrive at our house up to an hour early to make an initial search....
View ArticleThe Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter by Stephen Nadler: Descartes goes...
An admirable portrait of Descartes’s life in the Netherlands, but one which gives no sense of the strangeness of Descartes’s vision.The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter Stephen NadlerPrinceton...
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20 years after his death, we still know so little of Derek Jarman
A facsimile of his only book of poems, A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, and a new book of sketches, thoughts and quotations, brings Jarman's art into fuller and more luminous perspective.A Finger in the...
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