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I
n the mid-eighteenth century it “lacked
royalty, and the nobility that clustered
around the court”, but “the Irish spending
classes” nevertheless made it “a centre for
social display”. Two and a half centuries later
a bonanza of spending was followed by “the
bail-out, the gruesome revelations of hidden
loans, the property crash, the bankruptcies”. In
between, Dublin, the subject of a “richly
detailed” study reviewed by Clair Wills,
having nurtured or endured independence
movements, political sidelining, religious
conflict, social upheaval and civil war, “was
allowed to come home to itself as the longedfor capital”. It had previously liked “to wear
the mask” of one, according to James Joyce,
the city’s greatest modern novelist, who was
obliged to spend most of his life elsewhere.
Though not technically banned in Ireland,
Ulysses was not available there, either. The
tragicomic “furore” that dogged the novel in
the United States and England is recounted by
Terry Eagleton. The study he reviews puts its
finger on what was at stake: “If you could say
‘I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding
blasted fucking windpipe’, you could say anything”. Nor had Joyce escaped the attention of
J. Edgar Hoover’s General Intelligence Division, on the lookout for revolution of a different kind (serialization in the Little Review
coincided with a “Red scare”).
SOCIAL STUDIES
3
Clair Wills
David Dickson Dublin – The making of a capital city
LITERATURE, SOCIAL
STUDIES & POLITICS
5
Terry Eagleton
Kevin Birmingham The Most Dangerous Book – The battle for James
Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
Paolo Mancosu Inside the Zhivago Storm – The editorial adventures of
Pasternak’s masterpiece. Peter Finn and Petra Couvée The Zhivago
Affair – The Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book
Chiara Ferrari The Rhetoric of Violence and Sacrifice in Fascist Italy
– Mussolini, Gadda, Vittorini
Robert Service
Charles Burdett
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
6
ITALIAN LITERATURE
9
HISTORY & POLITICS
10
Not at Croydon Palace, Translating Strabo, Dirk Bogarde and PLF, etc
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Ippolito Nievo The Confessions of an Italian; Translated by Frederika
Randall
Matthew Cobb
Caroline Moorehead Village of Secrets – Defying the Nazis in Vichy
France. Peter Grose The Greatest Escape – How one French
community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis
John L. Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin, editors The Oxford
Handbook of Islam and Politics
Francis Robinson
HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY
12
James Barr
Ali A. Allawi Faisal I of Iraq. Scott Anderson Lawrence in Arabia –
War, deceit, imperial folly and the making of the modern Middle East
COMMENTARY
14
Sarah Richmond
Cynthia L. Haven
Alan Taylor
Then & Now
No more hypochondriacs – Problems of translating Jean-Paul Sartre
Writ on water – Regina Derieva
Freelance
TLS November 29, 1991 – William T. Vollmann’s ghosts
ARTS
17
Kelly Grovier
Michael Caines
Jonathan Barnes
Late Turner – Painting set free (Tate Britain)
Richard Bean Pitcairn (Globe Theatre)
Mike Bartlett King Charles III (Wyndham’s Theatre)
FICTION
19
Rob Turner
Patrick Flanery
Mark Kamine
Lorna Scott Fox
Maureen O’Rourke
William T. Vollmann Last Stories and Other Stories
Edan Lepucki California
Smith Henderson Fourth of July Creek
Joan Sales Uncertain Glory; Translated by Peter Bush
Dominique Eddé Kamal Jann; Translated by Ros Schwartz. Mahmoud
Dowlatabadi Thirst; Translated by Martin E. Weir
LITERATURE
22
Patricia Craig
Chris Agee et al The Other Tongues – An introduction to writing in
Irish, Scots Gaelic and Scots in Ulster and Scotland
POEM
22
Paul Henry
The See-saw
BIOGRAPHY & LITERARY
CRITICISM
23
Stephen Bernard
Mika Ross-Southall
Leo Damrosch Jonathan Swift – His life and his world
Don Herzog Household Politics – Conflict in early modern England
THEATRE
24
Julia Prest
Joseph Harris Inventing the Spectator – Subjectivity and the theatrical
experience in early modern France
Amanda Bailey Of Bondage – Debt, property, and personhood in early
modern England. Thomas Middleton A Trick To Catch the Old One;
Edited by Paul A. Mulholland
Sarah Dewar-Watson
FILM
25
Genevieve Yue
Roz Kaveney
Thirty years later, the CIA was playing its
part in “the blitz against the Soviet censorship”
of another forbidden novel: Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak. But the crucial role in “the
Pasternak affair”, Robert Service writes, was
taken by young Italian Communist intellectuals, pre-eminently Giangiacomo Feltrinelli
(pictured), with whom Pasternak had decided
to publish and be damned. In this story, as Service says, “idealism, ambition and calculation
are in constant play”. Some combination of
these drives any translator, but for Sarah Richmond, whose Commentary sees her half-way
through her new version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
L’Être et le Néant, it is the “anguish, abandonment, responsibility [that] constitute in fact
the quality of our consciousness”, as Sartre put
it, that are most familiar.
AJ
Rashan Wadia Richards Cinematic Flashes – Cinephilia and classical
Hollywood
Elisabetta Girelli Montgomery Clift, Queer Star
IN BRIEF
26
NATURAL HISTORY
28
Jeremy Mynott
Bernd Heinrich The Homing Instinct – The story and science of
migration
SPORT
30
Michael Beloff
Bill Jones Alone – The triumph and tragedy of John Curry
Nigel Smith A Collection of Ranter Writings – Spiritual liberty and
sexual freedom in the English Revolution. Andrew Crofts
Confessions of a Ghostwriter. Paula E. Morton Tortillas – A cultural
history. Tessa Boase The Housekeeper’s Tale – The women who really
ran the English country house. Michael Holroyd A Dog’s Life.
Geoffrey Boycott The Corridor of Certainty – My life beyond cricket.
Adriana Varga, editor Virginia Woolf and Music. Olivia Williams
Gin Glorious Gin – How Mother’s Ruin became the spirit of London
This week’s contributors, Crossword
31
NB
32
J. C.
Paris publishers, A modern Byron, TLS in Literature redux
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TLS OCTOBER 10 2014