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1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 letters@the-tls.co.uk G lobal politics is disconcertingly interesting at the moment. One lesson from the EU Referendum in Great Britain has been that an insurgency movement, a political uprising motivated – to whatever extent – by frustration and anti-establishment fervour, has finally succeeded at the ballot box. The Brexit vote has proved that our political verities have become somewhat shaky of late. So, we may be living in a post-fact, postexpertise world. The world, in other words, of Donald Trump, the reluctant subject of Richard Ford’s essay this week. Ford sees Trump as many see him, “preening and grimacing and mugging Mussolini-like, wagging his undersized finger”, but also notes that his rise to popularity should make America look more closely at itself. Trump, to Ford, is a “gaudy, tarnished symptom of our American disease”; an emblem of its unwillingness as a nation to confront its own reality: “it’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing”, concludes Ford, “it’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds”. If Trump is a figure of – to put it generously – evanescent talent, he contrasts clearly with the polymathic Goethe, active over a life of eightytwo years “as a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, librettist, translator, biographer, diarist, conversationalist, critic, theatre director, collector, painter, sculptor” and so on. The “essential” Goethe, one of the titles reviewed by Osman Durrani, is thus relatively difficult to boil down. His career and life encompassed arts and sciences, iconoclasm and establishment success, peaceful civilian duties and the French Revolution. He even took the time, we learn, to write a narrative poem on the causes of erectile dysfunction. He was an author, as Durrani notes, of continual metamorphosis. However changeable a life might be, its narrative path only reaches one end. When Jenny Diski was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, she resented the “pre-ordained banality” of the rest of her story, as she was left glumly to navigate “an already drawn flow-chart”. Instead, she has bequeathed to the world something greater than a flow chart: a memoir of a life well lived and beautifully described, of torments and troubles overcome at considerable cost. Diski lived as a teenager with Doris Lessing, having been raped at fourteen and later left homeless by heedless parents. Terri Apter discerns a “high octane rage that leaves her with a fiercely introverted spirit, proudly subjective, easily damaged and despoiled by the platitudes of commonplace exchanges”. Diski’s memoir is a hymn to that rage, but also the means by which she overcame it. It is a story of how she learned gratitude, and a piece of work for which we can be grateful too. SA GERMAN LITERATURE 3O sman Durrani Ritchie Robertson Goethe – A very short introduction. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Essential Goethe; Edited by Matthew Bell MEMOIRS 5Terri Apter Jenny Diski In Gratitude LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6 The Referendum and democracy, Beckett’s vim, Pity the blobfish, etc POLITICS 7Richard Ford Anatomy of Trump – A personal essay NATURAL HISTORY HISTORY 9Jeremy Mynott 10 Roy Foster John James Audubon The Missouri River Journals; Edited by Daniel Patterson Richard Bourke and Ian McBride, editors The Princeton History of Modern Ireland POEM 11 Stephen Knight As I Live and Breathe BIOGRAPHY 12 Kaya Genç Gerri Kimber Emer O’Sullivan The Fall of the House of Wilde – Oscar Wilde and his family Stanley Price James Joyce and Italo Svevo – The story of a friendship POETRY 14 Justin Quinn Tom Walker Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time. Michael Allen Close Readings – Essays on Irish poetry; Edited by Fran Brearton. Harry Clifton Ireland and its Elsewheres – The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry. John Dennison Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry COMMENTARY ARTS 16 Ian Thomson Katherine Ashenburg Waiting for life – Natalia Ginzburg 100 years on Freelance 18 Craig Raine Guy Dammann Patrick McCaughey Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern) Giuseppe Verdi Il Trovatore (Royal Opera House) Richard Serra (Gagosian Gallery, New York) FICTION ECOLOGY 21 Kate Webb Norma Clarke Rebecca K. Morrison James Copnall Sam Byers 24 Richard Betts Harry Johnstone ANTHROPOLOGY 26 Jeremy Swift Michael F. Brown LITERARY CRITICISM 27 David Winters Kirsty Martin MEDICINE & SCIENCE 29 John Henry Marina Gerner IN BRIEF 30 POLITICS 32 Sholto Byrnes Harry Mount CULTURAL STUDIES 33 Houman Barekat FROM THE ARCHIVES 34 NB 35 36 M. C. John Keene Counternarratives Francis Spufford Golden Hill Roberto Schopflocher Das Komplott zu Lima Patrice Nganang Mount Pleasant; Translated by Amy Baram Reid Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Tim Flannery Atmosphere of Hope – Solutions to the climate crisis. Oliver Morton The Planet Remade – How geoengineering could change the world Joel K. Bourne The End of Plenty – The race to feed a crowded world David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger – Food, justice, and money in the twenty-first century Nick McDonell The Civilization of Perpetual Movement Nicholas C. Kawa Amazonia in the Anthropocene – People, soils, plants, forests Rita Felski The Limits of Critique Ross Posnock Renunciation – Acts of abandonment by writers, philosophers, and artists Richard Barnett Crucial Interventions – An illustrated treatise on the principles and practice of nineteenth-century surgery Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, editors Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science Marc Singer Trump & Me. Evelyn Louise Crawford and Marylouise Patterson, editors Letters from Langston. Wilkie Collins Jezebel’s Daughter. R. J. Arnold Grétry’s Operas and the French Public. Alexei Sayle Thatcher Stole My Trousers. Susan Beale The Good Guy. Jillian Keenan Sex with Shakespeare. Kate Moore The Radium Girls J. J. Robinson The Maldives – Islamic republic, tropical autocracy Ben Wright Order, Order! – The rise and fall of political drinking Darian Leader Hands – What we do with them – and why On Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (from the TLS February 14, 1905) This week’s contributors, Crossword Geoffrey Hill’s jam-jar, Battles in Boston and Buenos Aires, Page 147 Cover picture: “Bad Hair Day” Donald Trump. 2016 © Gerald Scarfe; p3 © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images; p4 © akg-images; p8 © Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters; p9 © The Natural History Museum/Alamy; p11 © Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg via Getty Images; p15 © Leonardo Cendamo/Writer Pictures; p16 © Gattoni/Leemage/Writer Pictures; p18 © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London. Photo by Malcom Varon; p19 © Alastair Muir; p20 © Richard Serra. Photograph by Cristiano Mascaro; p21 Courtesy of National Gallery, London; p23 (bottom) © Stevie Taylor/Bridgeman Images; p24 © The Yomiuri Shimbun/PA; p25 © Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Getty Images; p29 (top) © Wellcome Library, London; p29 (bottom) © Peter Lloyd/Alamy; p33 © Mar Photographics/Alamy; p36 © The Laurence Sterne Trust The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except a double issue in August and December by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc., 195 Anderson Avenue, Moonachie, NJ 07074-1621. Periodical postage paid at Moonachie NJ and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, P0 Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA TLS JULY 15 2016

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000

Fax: 020 7782 4966 letters@the-tls.co.uk

G lobal politics is disconcertingly interesting at the moment. One lesson from the EU Referendum in Great Britain has been that an insurgency movement, a political uprising motivated – to whatever extent – by frustration and anti-establishment fervour, has finally succeeded at the ballot box. The Brexit vote has proved that our political verities have become somewhat shaky of late.

So, we may be living in a post-fact, postexpertise world. The world, in other words, of Donald Trump, the reluctant subject of Richard Ford’s essay this week. Ford sees Trump as many see him, “preening and grimacing and mugging Mussolini-like, wagging his undersized finger”, but also notes that his rise to popularity should make America look more closely at itself. Trump, to Ford, is a “gaudy, tarnished symptom of our American disease”; an emblem of its unwillingness as a nation to confront its own reality: “it’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing”, concludes Ford, “it’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds”.

If Trump is a figure of – to put it generously – evanescent talent, he contrasts clearly with the polymathic Goethe, active over a life of eightytwo years “as a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, librettist, translator, biographer, diarist, conversationalist, critic, theatre director, collector, painter, sculptor” and so on. The “essential” Goethe, one of the titles reviewed by Osman Durrani, is thus relatively difficult to boil down. His career and life encompassed arts and sciences, iconoclasm and establishment success, peaceful civilian duties and the French Revolution. He even took the time, we learn, to write a narrative poem on the causes of erectile dysfunction. He was an author, as Durrani notes, of continual metamorphosis.

However changeable a life might be, its narrative path only reaches one end. When Jenny Diski was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, she resented the “pre-ordained banality” of the rest of her story, as she was left glumly to navigate “an already drawn flow-chart”.

Instead, she has bequeathed to the world something greater than a flow chart: a memoir of a life well lived and beautifully described, of torments and troubles overcome at considerable cost. Diski lived as a teenager with Doris Lessing, having been raped at fourteen and later left homeless by heedless parents. Terri Apter discerns a “high octane rage that leaves her with a fiercely introverted spirit, proudly subjective, easily damaged and despoiled by the platitudes of commonplace exchanges”.

Diski’s memoir is a hymn to that rage, but also the means by which she overcame it. It is a story of how she learned gratitude, and a piece of work for which we can be grateful too.

SA

GERMAN LITERATURE 3O sman Durrani

Ritchie Robertson Goethe – A very short introduction. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Essential Goethe; Edited by Matthew Bell

MEMOIRS

5Terri Apter

Jenny Diski In Gratitude

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6

The Referendum and democracy, Beckett’s vim, Pity the blobfish, etc

POLITICS

7Richard Ford

Anatomy of Trump – A personal essay

NATURAL HISTORY

HISTORY

9Jeremy Mynott

10 Roy Foster

John James Audubon The Missouri River Journals; Edited by Daniel Patterson

Richard Bourke and Ian McBride, editors The Princeton History of Modern Ireland

POEM

11 Stephen Knight

As I Live and Breathe

BIOGRAPHY

12 Kaya Genç

Gerri Kimber

Emer O’Sullivan The Fall of the House of Wilde – Oscar Wilde and his family Stanley Price James Joyce and Italo Svevo – The story of a friendship

POETRY

14 Justin Quinn

Tom Walker Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time. Michael Allen Close Readings – Essays on Irish poetry; Edited by Fran Brearton. Harry Clifton Ireland and its Elsewheres – The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry. John Dennison Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry

COMMENTARY

ARTS

16 Ian Thomson

Katherine Ashenburg Waiting for life – Natalia Ginzburg 100 years on Freelance

18 Craig Raine

Guy Dammann Patrick McCaughey

Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern) Giuseppe Verdi Il Trovatore (Royal Opera House) Richard Serra (Gagosian Gallery, New York)

FICTION

ECOLOGY

21 Kate Webb

Norma Clarke Rebecca K. Morrison James Copnall Sam Byers

24 Richard Betts

Harry Johnstone

ANTHROPOLOGY

26 Jeremy Swift

Michael F. Brown

LITERARY CRITICISM 27 David Winters

Kirsty Martin

MEDICINE & SCIENCE 29 John Henry

Marina Gerner

IN BRIEF

30

POLITICS

32 Sholto Byrnes

Harry Mount

CULTURAL STUDIES

33 Houman Barekat

FROM THE ARCHIVES 34

NB

35

36 M. C.

John Keene Counternarratives Francis Spufford Golden Hill Roberto Schopflocher Das Komplott zu Lima Patrice Nganang Mount Pleasant; Translated by Amy Baram Reid Helen Oyeyemi What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Tim Flannery Atmosphere of Hope – Solutions to the climate crisis. Oliver Morton The Planet Remade – How geoengineering could change the world Joel K. Bourne The End of Plenty – The race to feed a crowded world David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger – Food, justice, and money in the twenty-first century

Nick McDonell The Civilization of Perpetual Movement Nicholas C. Kawa Amazonia in the Anthropocene – People, soils, plants, forests

Rita Felski The Limits of Critique Ross Posnock Renunciation – Acts of abandonment by writers, philosophers, and artists

Richard Barnett Crucial Interventions – An illustrated treatise on the principles and practice of nineteenth-century surgery Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, editors Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science

Marc Singer Trump & Me. Evelyn Louise Crawford and Marylouise Patterson, editors Letters from Langston. Wilkie Collins Jezebel’s Daughter. R. J. Arnold Grétry’s Operas and the French Public. Alexei Sayle Thatcher Stole My Trousers. Susan Beale The Good Guy. Jillian Keenan Sex with Shakespeare. Kate Moore The Radium Girls

J. J. Robinson The Maldives – Islamic republic, tropical autocracy Ben Wright Order, Order! – The rise and fall of political drinking

Darian Leader Hands – What we do with them – and why

On Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (from the TLS February 14, 1905)

This week’s contributors, Crossword

Geoffrey Hill’s jam-jar, Battles in Boston and Buenos Aires, Page 147

Cover picture: “Bad Hair Day” Donald Trump. 2016 © Gerald Scarfe; p3 © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images; p4 © akg-images; p8 © Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters; p9 © The Natural History Museum/Alamy; p11 © Aidan Crawley/Bloomberg via Getty Images; p15 © Leonardo Cendamo/Writer Pictures; p16 © Gattoni/Leemage/Writer Pictures; p18 © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London. Photo by Malcom Varon; p19 © Alastair Muir; p20 © Richard Serra. Photograph by Cristiano Mascaro; p21 Courtesy of National Gallery, London; p23 (bottom) © Stevie Taylor/Bridgeman Images; p24 © The Yomiuri Shimbun/PA; p25 © Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Getty Images; p29 (top) © Wellcome Library, London; p29 (bottom) © Peter Lloyd/Alamy; p33 © Mar Photographics/Alamy; p36 © The Laurence Sterne Trust The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except a double issue in August and December by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc., 195 Anderson Avenue, Moonachie, NJ 07074-1621. Periodical postage paid at Moonachie NJ and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, P0 Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS JULY 15 2016

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