Atget’s Paris Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was a pioneer of documentary photography, and is now famous for his street scenes of Paris, which provide an invaluable sense of the city in the years following the destruction of the Commune and what came to be known in retrospect as “la Belle Époque”. His work was discovered…
Category: Biographies
Getting the Eye in
Kathleen Jamie’s Nature Writing I used to be on very good terms with Kathleen Jamie around the time I was studying medicine at Glasgow and she was emerging as a talented poet: I still have a copy of her first volume Black Spiders (1982), published when she was barely twenty, with its…
The Dancer and the Body
More than a hundred years after its first publication in German, NYRB Editions has released the collection “Bright Magic: Stories”—edited and translated by Damien Searls and with an introduction by Günter Grass—which allows us to read Alfred Döblin’s early expressionistic work along with some later fables and “incomprehensible stories”. One of its entries “The Ballerina…
When doctors die
When Paul Kalanithi’s short (unfinished) memoir When Breath Becomes Air was released in early 2016, it went on to become, with some assiduous marketing, a non-fiction bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The story it tells is a poignant one, of final acceptance of a fatal illness and marital reconciliation, while offering a very…
Safeguards and salvage
Updated version Adam Kirsch (born 1976) is an American poet and literary critic whose work is distinguished by its scope and ambition, its continuing appraisal of the modernist movement and its growing interest in religious writings (as opposed to literary ones): Kirsch’s intriguing daily readings of the Talmud can be found on the Tablet website….
Irony lady
Living under Mrs Thatcher Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 film The Iron Lady won Meryl Streep the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. Twenty-five years after she has was ousted as prime minister, Thatcher’s impact on British life continues to polarise opinion. She was leader of the Conservative Party but her policies were…
Being Nice to Nietzsche
In his vagabondage around western Europe in the decade of white-hot creativity that was granted him after he resigned his chair in philology at the University of Basle, three other cities were of particular importance to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: Nice, Genoa and Turin—all cities with an Alpine background. The last of them impressed…
Empurpled
If every poet’s work has its chromatic wavelength, one that could be played on Rimbaud’s mystical organ for synaesthetic vowels, then Georg Trakl monopolizes the far end of the spectrum, lilac shading into violet into intense near-blackness…
Radical Kleist
A New Biography of Heinrich von Kleist Two hundred years ago, on a mild November day on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee near Potsdam, Heinrich von Kleist shot Henrietta Vogel, terminally ill (according to her doctor) with what was probably endometrial cancer, then himself. She was 31; he was 34. The local church book…
Science & Letters 