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I. The Last Apocalypse by Peter Riley.
‘The two beacons of apocalypse are of course Dylan Thomas and W.S. Graham, both deeply engaged with poeticised language at its most evasive, Thomas grappling with sense, Graham with language. Thomas was in many ways the original when in 1933, to quote Keery, “A poem in a sports journal by a provincial teenager, sent shock waves through literary London – acclaim which, as William Empson noted, ‘does some credit to the town’”.’
II. Brodsky’s Travels: Leningrad to Venice by Jeffrey Meyers.
‘Once sent into exile, Brodsky, charged with curiosity and energy, became a wanderer and a cunning Ulysses. His travels were at once a flight to freedom and quest for inspiration, a synthesis of history and direct experience. His response to a new city and its culture was a means of self-exploration and self-revelation.’
III. The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy.
‘Here the mouths breathe, the blood circulates; the painter has eyes only for life, for its warmth and its liberation from all forms. What seduced him in this instance was the vast sexual force that courses through Creation, where it has often been perceived as one of the consequences of Original Sin.’ Translated by Hoyt Rogers. Published to accompany Bonnefoy’s essay, one by Rogers: ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento.’
IV. Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein.
In the early decades of the last century, Egypt was home to ‘a remarkable collection of temporary residents, survivors from the shipwreck of modernity, scrambling and hustling, hiding out, stuck, or making the most of a good thing as long as it lasts’. Like its coastal twin, Alexandria, pre-war Cairo was a polyglot metropolis, ‘cosmopolitan yet also ruthlessly exploited and riven with profound levels of inequality’. Art critic Raphael Rubinstein surveys the scattered artifacts of an exotic literary backwater.
V. Belle of the Belle-Époque: Anna de Noailles by Anthony Howell.
‘She sets out to make a poem in very much the way a painter may set up in front of a landscape: a painter determined to be true to the new naturalism, and include the factory’s chimney and the smoke from a passing train. But there is something fauve about Anna, and about her poetic work. For all its mastery of form, it remains true to Dionysus. It is wild. Its hues are intense.’ Published with thirteen of her poems in English-language versions by Anthony Howell.
VI. Women down the well by Natalia Ginzburg.
‘Women have a bad habit: they sometimes fall down a well; they are seized by a horrid sense of melancholia, drown in it, and struggle to come back to the surface. This is the real problem afflicting women…I have met so many women, and now I always find something worthy of commiseration in every single one of them, some kind of trouble, kept more or less secret, and more or less big: the tendency to fall down the well and find there a chance for suffering, which men do not know about.’ First English-language translation by Nicoletta Asciuto.
VII. Considering I, alone by Alan Wall.
An interrogation of the first person. ‘When Freud began his practice he was known as an alienist; one who could enter the alienated realm of the mentally disturbed and translate the mangled language to be heard therein into the coherence of scientific explanation…Rimbaud’s programme was the precise opposite. He would seek the “dérèglement de tous les sens”. Not merely the derangement of the senses, but their deregulation. One might translate his wish thus, as a precise inversion of Freud’s programme: to translate ego into id. Between these two I’s, poetry still ventures.’
VIII. George Maciunas and Fluxus by Simon Collings.
‘Drawing a clear boundary around Fluxus is, as many commentators have noted, an impossible task. Maciunas’ international network of Fluxus collaborators included musicians, visual artists, film-makers and writers, many of them experimenting with mixed media forms. Most of the artists had a life beyond Fluxus, and practices diverged significantly.’
IX. Mauritius by Emma Park.
In three voices, including J-H Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s ‘traveller’s tale’: ‘This is my European disease, to wake up at night, tormented by the fear…that the places where I have lived have remained and will always remain indifferent to me. I cannot bear the thought that my existence will have left no more of an impression on the path of history than a moth’s wing. Even though, if I had proper humility, I should remember how many people there are in the world, even on this distant island, and accept that there is little enough reason why I of all of them should be remembered.’
X. Tintoretto at 500 by Hoyt Rogers and Michele Casagrande.
On the fifth centennial of Tintoretto’s birth, marked by exhibitions in Venice and Washington (through 7 July 2019), Hoyt Rogers reflects on the artist’s work and what it has meant to him. ‘Of all painters,’ he writes, ‘Tintoretto is the most Janus-like; he resumes the entire Renaissance, but he also looks forward to the future.’ This article appears in the portfolio ‘Tintoretto and Venice,’ which includes an essay by Michele Casagrande and a cycle of poems by Rogers.
XI. Leaving Sidi Bou Said by Lorand Gaspar.
‘Do you know Sidi Bou Said? There are perhaps only a few dozen places in our world where such a miraculous masterpiece took place, born of an interaction between the mind and the experience of the men of an era, their skills, as well as the complex nature of the site itself…’ A visit to a former home by the French poet and essayist. With photographs by the author.
XII. Prose poetry lost and found by Ian Seed.
A personal reflection: ‘I was impressed by what could be achieved in so few words. And finally, there was the fact that this was called a “poem”, but in terms of shape it did not resemble any of the poetry that I was studying at school, although I had read and enjoyed Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I had picked out on my own from the school library. Blake was in fact an important figure for Patchen.’ Also in The Fortnightly: Anthony Howell inquires: ‘The Prose Poem: What the hell is it?’
Plus… Roger Fry and the formalist project by Marnin Young.
For painter Walter Sickert (right), the so-called Post-Impressionists are united only by their wilful “deformation” and violations of “quality,” but Roger Fry’s formalism owned the future. Both wrote about the 1910-11 Grafton exhibition for The Fortnightly Review. ‘The difference between the two texts, republished here, is about as good a demonstration as one could find of an intellectual watershed.’
and… Thoughts on Germany by Orson Welles.
‘You’d journeyed down from Berlin, and, in a break in the journey, you’d come upon this real, live munitions maker. There he was, with a flower in his button-hole, an Argentine girl at his side, a respectful ring of Swiss bankers all about him, smoking an Havana cigar on the borders of an Italian lake. The eyes in the sharply drawn, solid-looking head, are set in a questing expression. They are the eyes of a shrewd hunter, but you surprise in them a curious pallid emptiness—a dead spot. It is as though the centre of a target were painted white, or like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado.’
and… Walter Benjamin and the City by Alan Wall.
‘In the modern city, Benjamin observed the decay of experience. Here, experience shallowed out and speeded up…Continuities were fractured. Holistic representation shattered into montage, a kaleidoscope of impressions hammering away at the sensorium. It is impossible to draw an isometric section of modernity, because it will not stop moving long enough for the measurements to be made.’
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Edited by Denis Boyles and Alan Macfarlane.
Poetry Editor: Peter Riley.
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Editors, Contributors, and Contact Details.
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Editorial Statement.
The object of THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is to become the organ of the unbiassed expression of many and various minds on topics of general interest in Politics, Literature, Philosophy, Science, and Art. Each contribution will have the gravity of an avowed responsibility. Each contributor, in giving his name, will not only give an earnest of his sincerity, but will claim the privilege of perfect freedom of opinion, unbiassed by the opinions of the Editor or of fellow contributors….We do not disguise from ourselves the difficulties of our task. Even with the best aid from contributors, we shall at first have to contend against the impatience of readers at the advocacy of opinions which they disapprove.
– Prospectus, G.H. Lewes, May 13, 1865. Emphasis added.
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Welcome to The Fortnightly Review. This is the New Series.
A Partial Archive of the New Series.
For a search of the complete archive use the ‘search’ box in the right-hand column. In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations on text pages are thumbnails with captions embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. Some video elements also appear as thumbnails. To play them full-screen in YouTube, click twice. Pressing the escape key will return you to the originating page.
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Departments.
Poetry Notes by Peter Riley.
Clues & Labyrinths by Alan Wall.
Currente Calamo by Michael Blackburn.
Rejected! The history of literary disappointment by Stephen Wade.
Verisimilitudes: Essays and approximations by James Gallant.
The American Note by Chloë Hawkey.
Letter from Venice by Robin Saikia.
Una Visione Estesa by Keith Johnson.
The Trollope Prize (University of Kansas).
Museums & Collections by Ian Sansom.
Reviews and comment on books, etc.
The Fortnightly Serials.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016-17: The Survival Manual in eight parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale. By Tom Lowenstein.
2019: My First Thirty Years. By Alan Macfarlane.
The TROLLOPE PRIZE Winners.
Index.
2011: The Intensive and Extensive Worlds of Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage by Lucy Sheehan, Columbia University.
2012: A Competitive World: Ambition and Self-Help in Trollope’s An Autobiography and The Three Clerks by Rebecca Richardson, Stanford University.
2013: Sanction, pragmatic pursuit and civil society in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds by Andrew Lallier, University of Knoxville (graduate) and Performative realism by Emily Halliwell-MacDonald, University of Toronto (undergraduate)
2014: Love in a time of politics by Gregory Brennen, Duke University (graduate) and Trollope and Darwin by Molly Menickelly, William & Mary (undergraduate).
2015: The Temporality of Realism and Romance in He Knew He Was Right by Sarah Faulkner, University of Washington.2016: No award.
2017: Trollope’s ‘Feeling for the world’ in Fixed Period by Joel Simundich, Brown University (graduate) and ‘Resisting Temptation’ in Trollope’s Small House by Katharine Scott, College of William and Mary (undergraduate).
2018: In medias res: Liminal Spaces in The Duke’s Children by Devon Boyers, College of William and Mary (undergraduate).
2019: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now by Deirdre Mikolajcik, University of Kentucky (graduate) and A Less-Beaten Path: Hybridity and Naturalism in Anthony Trollope’s West Indian Short Fiction by Nyssa Ruth Fahy, Penn State Brandywyne (undergraduate).
Poetry Notes by Peter Riley.
Five new poems by Lana Bella
New poems by Richard Berengarten.
Children of war in Palestine by Manash Bhattacharjee.
The Birds of the Sherborne Missal by Elisabeth Bletsoe.
Vignettes (V) by Iain Britton.
Lorenzo Calogero: Six poems in new translations by John Taylor.
An excerpt from ‘Blind Distance’ by Pierre Chapuis, translated by John Taylor.
Two poems by Arup K Chatterjee.
‘After Argos…’ by Kelvin Corcoran
Anthony Costello: three new poems.
Five poems by Emily Critchley
Translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets (and five more poems) by Emily Critchley.
Three new poems by David Cooke.
Rrose Sélevy by Robert Desnos, newly translated by Simon Collings.
Æcerbot by Steve Ely.
Hefted by Gary Evans.
Twelve prose poems by Monk Gibbon
Preface to ‘Émaux et camées’ by Théophile Gautier, translated by Harry Guest.
Five poems by Gëzim Hajdari translated by Ian Seed.
‘After Tranströmer’ and four more poems by Colin Honnor.
Three poems by Colin Honnor.
My part in the downfall of everything: a satire on Deceit by Anthony Howell.
An excerpt from Silent Highway by Anthony Howell.
Diatribe by Anthony Howell.
‘Eucalypso Redux’ and ‘Battleships/Romance’ by Alex Houen.
Quite frankly, a sequence by Peter Hughes.
Seven sonnets by Keith Hutson.
Two Vilanelles by Zainab Ismail.
Three poems by Sam James.
Grandeur by Andrew Jordan.
Three poems by Steve Kronen.
Three récits by Georges Limbour, in new translations by Simon Collings
A Scrap of Paper by Paul Hyacinthe Loyson, Translations by JG Frazer and Edward Brabrook.
Two new poems by Carola Luther.
New poems by Franca Mancinelli, from Little Book of Passage translated by John Taylor.
Happiness Is the New Bedtime by Becka Mara McKay.
Four ‘ad-libs’ for John Berryman by Lawrence Markert.
Three poems by Anne Mounic translated by Harry Guest.
Essay on Spam by Alistair Noon.
Play — for 26 voices by Alice Notley.
Six Poems by Lewis Oakwood.
Three new poems by Karl O’Hanlon
The Man Who Turned to Paper, with three more new poems by Simon Perril.
The Wild Child by Laura Potts.
The Picture in Ireland by Laura Potts
‘La Petite Gloire’, from a fragment by Raymond Queneau, translated by Augustus Young.
‘X’, an excerpt from Due North by Peter Riley.
The Lay of Love and Death of Christoph Cornet Rilke von Langenau, by Ranier Maria Rilke, translated by Harry Guest.
‘Recessional’ and other new poems by Hoyt Rogers.
Six new poems by Peter Robinson.
Seven new poems by Peter Robinson.
Winétt de Rokha: Three Poems translated by J. Mark Smith.
‘At Ladywell Cemetery’ and ‘Rossiya’ by Carol Rumens
Two Poems by James Russell.
Six-Way Mirror by Robert Saxton
Parabola by Maurice Scully.
Five poems by Jules Supervielle translated by Ian Seed.
Three new poems by Sanjeev Sethi.
Four Poems by Christopher Steare.
Fair by Martin Thom.
Partita for solo violin by Ruby Turok-Squire.
Two poems by Ruby Turok-Squire.
‘Y’, by Pierre Voélin translated by John Taylor.
Fetish by Alan Wall.
The Art of Writing and other poems by Alan Wall.
Midrash by Alan Wall.
‘Midrash’ part four: Lingua Adamica by Alan Wall.
A polyptych for Anne Frank by Vanessa Waltz.
Poems in Prose by Oscar Wilde.
Four poems by John Welch.
Five new poems by Judith Willson.
Two poems from ‘Poems without Irony’ by Alex Wong
Shrinking Cities and Small Station by Alan Zhukovski.
Alphabetical by author.
The Old Man by Robert Coover
An Encounter by Robert Coover
A recollection of L’Adorée by Ethel Dilke
The Attendant by Nigel Ford
The Adjunct by James Gallant.
Fools Rush In by Michael Buckingham Gray.
The More Things Change by Michael Buckingham Gray
Once more with feeling by Michael Buckingham Gray
Men with women: three more very short stories by Michael Buckingham Gray
New translations from The Dice Cup by Max Jacob, translated by Ian Seed
More new translations of poems from Max Jacob’s ‘The Dice Cup’ translated by Ian Seed
Things by D.H. Lawrence
The Vanishing by David Rea
Nine tiny fictions by Ian Seed.
New York Hotel and Five Other Prose Pieces by Ian Seed.
Italian Lessons by Ian Seed.
Nine thimblefuls of fiction by Ian Seed.
Gold by Martin Sorrell.
‘Do you know Brunetière?’ by Erik Butler.
It’s unusual for a critic to be despised to the point where social events are organized to express revulsion. But Ferdinand Brunetière antagonized France at a particularly volatile moment. ‘The Third Republic incubated twentieth-century Europe: accelerating industrialization, democracy, mass movements, colonialist projects, nationalism, anti-Semitism, secularism, and more still. Now, at the outset of a new millennium, perhaps Brunetière’s day has come again.’ A dossier with an appreciation by Yetta Blaze de Bury from our archive and a supplemental ebook by Elton Hocking.
On The Manager by Richard Berengarten: A critical dossier edited by Paul Scott Derrick, with contributions by A. Robert Lee, Anthony Walton and Kay Young.
La Serenissima: A Fortnightly travel dossier by Robin Saikia, Gigi Bon, Hoyt Rogers, Michele Casagrande, with photographs by Alvise Nicoletti.
Remy de Gourmont: A dossier devoted to ‘the critical consciousness of a generation’ (according to TS Eliot), with remarks by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, John Taylor and Paul Cohen.
André du Bouchet: a portfolio of his verse translated by Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers with an introduction to his work.
A Memorial Dossier honoring Yves Bonnefoy with contributions from Hoyt Rogers and Anthony Rudolf.
Reflections on Walter Benjamin by Alan Wall.
The Tagore Dossier: Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats (with a post-script by Marianne Moore), William Rothenstein, Harold M. Hurwitz and Tagore’s At the Fair.
Roger Fry and the formalist project by Marnin Young, with a dispute: Post-impressionists by Walter Sickert vs. Post-Impressionism by Roger Fry.
The function of criticism at the present time by Matthew Arnold.
The interview as text and performance by Richard Berengarten and John Dillon.
Octavio Paz in Cambridge, 1970 by Richard Berengarten.
The Wonders of Man in the Age of Simulations by Roger Berkowitz.
Henry James by Theodora Bosanquet, introduced by Pamela Thurschwell
A ‘Pataphysical Education by Paul Cohen.
Ringing the Changes by Paul Scott Derrick.
On ‘The Manager’, A critical dossier devoted to Richard Berengarten’s long poem. Edited by Paul Scott Derrick. (See above, in ‘Dossiers’).
Artists and their physicians: Van Gogh and Dr Paul Gachet by Anthony Costello and Emma Storr.
The Utopian Animal by David Eisenberg.
As Aristotle observed, “all men by nature desire to know.” But knowledge, that is absolute knowledge or wisdom, is unattainable, hence the enduring pursuit of it and the unceasing restlessness that reposes in man. Utopias preclude this pursuit; they promise an end to this restlessness. They do not presage the attainment of wisdom, so much as an end to the perpetual striving for it.
The History of Imagism by F. S. Flint.
Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’ by James Gallant.
The other side where sight is without eyes’, two short essays by James Gallant.
Jeffrey Kirpal’s ‘extreme religious experiences’ by James Gallant.
Otto Rank’s Variations on a Theme by James Gallant.
Arthur Rimbaud’s anti-poetic life by Francis Gribble.
Anthony Rudolf’s literary Wunderkammer by Harry Guest.
Peter Dent’s ‘starmaps left for night’ by Harry Guest.
A ‘slanting view’ of Peter Redgrove by Harry Guest.
The Making of Mugabe by Lance Guma.
Thought Leaders and Ted Talks by Chloë Hawkey
Canon/Archive reviewed by Chloë Hawkey
Satire for the Millennium by Anthony Howell.
‘If ever an age needed its satirists it is now, when a divided country with its knickers positively knotted is fast becoming the laughing stock of the world. Such divisive times have usually provided satire with a breeding ground…Lovelace, Rochester, Dryden and Pope lived in turbulent times, as ours are increasingly becoming, and yet it seems that everyone these days has become too earnest for satire…’
John Ashbery 1927-2017 by Anthony Howell.The Prose Poem: What the Hell is it? by Anthony Howell.
The Poems of Basil Bunting by Anthony Howell.
‘The New Beauty’ by Anthony Howell
Asprezza: a Paean to the Pioneer of the Madrigal by Anthony Howell.
Shame and shamelessness: Freud, Gide and Immoralism, by Anthony Howell.
Sonnets for all, gathered by Anthony Howell.
Zoran Music in Dachau by Steven Jaron.
Pierre Loti profiled by Henry James.
Ibsen’s new drama by James Joyce.
Two essays on Jane Austen by Thomas Kebbel.
The Gospel of Honour by Christopher Landrum.
‘The distinction for Cicero was clear: courage is a momentary impulse, and honor is the reward for what is courageously done in that impulsive moment. But when Marcellus thought he could get away with building one temple for two gods, the officiating priests protested his maneuver. That is, the legal authorities determined that just as two soldiers deserving honor don’t receive a single medal for bravery, two gods can’t share the same temple…’
A charming sense of the new by Christopher Landrum.
‘Things’ by D.H. Lawrence.
The Case of Edmund Rack By Tom Lowenstein.
Notes from an Alpine Landscape by Tom Lowenstein.
Dreams…and nightmares of four civilisations by Alan Macfarlane.
‘It is extremely difficult to pierce to the core of a civilisation. However, one indirect, but powerful, way to do this is to examine the dreams and the nightmares that haunt daily life. Civilisations characteristically project their beliefs, identities and anxieties onto a mirror of ‘The Other’. The dreams, or ideal types of behaviour to which we should aspire, tell us about the hopes of a civilisation. The anxieties and worries, the way in which this ‘Other’ mirrors the fears of powers that are believed to be trying to undermine a civilisation’s beliefs and institutions are equally revealing.’
Imagining Coleridge and Evans by Rachel Mann.
Into the NHS’s vortex of care: Augustus Young’s Heavy Years, reviewed by Marianne Mays
The cars, carpets and chemistry of the National Gallery’s John Mills by John McEwen.
Six pages from ‘Lots of Fun with Finnegans Wake’ by Peter O’Brien.
Antonin Artaud in Ireland by Peter O’Brien.
Martin Slater’s National Debt: A short history reviewed by Nick O’Hear
Modernist Aesthetics:
An Objective Theory by Tronn Overend.
‘Aquinas’s notion of clarity can be understood as the development of a theme. This sits easily with the Modernists. Explorations ‘of the thing itself’ was ‘never’ complicated by also trying to incorporate things ‘on it’. Such ornamentation would always confuse the problem of thematic development. Is there too much? Is there enough? Does it add anything to the form and the proportion that is being explored? By simplifying their project, Modernists more easily achieved clarity of purpose and a simpler development of their themes.’
Why write about war? by Andy Owen.
Bernard Stone and the Turret by Brian Patten.
With Warhol on the Move by Charles Plymell.
‘Poetry Notes’ by Peter Riley, complete to date. (Including most of those items listed in the main archive index)
2018 Summer Shelf of poetry reviews by Peter Riley
The ‘awkwardness’ of Denise Riley, by Peter Riley.
On a poem by John Riley by Peter Riley.
Pierre Reverdy’s ‘non-novel’ reviewed by Peter Riley.
Expanded translation by Peter Riley.
Extremist poetry of the last century by Peter Riley.
‘But first, it should be said that the initial impulsion behind it all included centrally a bitter and sweeping disdain for poetry as normally understood and practised in UK, and the society that produced it and is inseparably bound to it….The terms used are unforgiving and sometimes feel close to a rejection of poetry itself, certainly a desperate flight away from it as it stands, along with almost all twentieth-century English literature and everything it inhabits and propagates.’
Translating du Bouchet: An exchange with Peter Riley by Hoyt Rogers.
Zbigniew Kotowicz by Anthony Rudolf.
Of wisdom and folly in art, from Eagle’s Nest, by John Ruskin.
The Pennells’ ‘new life of Whistler’ by Walter Sickert.
The Poems of ‘H.D.’ by May Sinclair
Shelley, the ‘divine poet’ by Gilbert Thomas.
Francis Thompson: A boy and his dog by Katharine Tynan.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Dreams of Nerve Cells by Charles Vecht.
Irony and Ironists by Alan Wall.
R.B. Kitaj reviewed by Alan Wall.
Modernist poetics by Alan Wall.
Walter Benjamin and Surrealism by Alan Wall.
Walter Benjamin: Notes for the End of Time by Alan Wall.
The Poet and the Dictionary by Alan Wall.
Textuality by Alan Wall.
Walter Benjamin and the City by Alan Wall.
That liminal year: 1922, by Alan Wall.
An English Lady, a portrait of the author’s mother, by Hugh Walpole.
Thoughts on Germany by Orson Welles.
The Rediscovery of the Unique by H.G. Wells.
Quixote on the Brooklyn Bridge: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 reviewed by Nigel Wheale.
Barry Schwabsky’s Heretics of Language reviewed by Nigel Wheale.
Shakespeare’s ‘Islamic’ poem, a two-part investigation by Nigel Wheale.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, at Wiltons, reviewed by Nigel Wheale.
A Drohobych Diptych: The parallel lives of Bruno Schulz and Stepan Bandera by H.A. Willis
Duties of care in the study of literature by Alex Wong.
Morton Feldman and the listening body at the Hugh Lane, Dublin, by Jona Xhepa.
The poet as ‘strategic’ ironist by Alex Wong.
Spender’s last take by Andrew Graham-Yooll.
Language and genocide by Tom Zoellner.
‘After the independence movements of the 1950s, Francophone Africa lay spread in a wide belt across the center of the continent, split into autonomous nations and competing interests. Paris continued to wield outsized monetary and military influence in its former colonies and among its neighbors, and, in times of dispute, tended to see those who spoke French as “the good guys” and all the rest as the enemies.’
FROM ‘POETRY NOTES’.
Karl O’Hanlon and Daragh Breen by Peter Riley.
Angela Leighton and Geraldine Monk by Peter Riley
Expanded translation by Peter Riley.
Lorenzo Calogero and Other Poets in Translation by Peter Riley.
Ilhan Berk by Peter Riley.
Poets, Calm by Peter Riley.
Poets, Angry by Peter Riley.
Christopher Middletonby Peter Riley.
From on high and from the tall grass by Peter Riley.
Poets once young by Peter Riley.
The New Pastoral in French Poetry by Peter Riley.
The Apophatic Poetry of André du Bouchet by Peter Riley.
Mellors, Philpott, and the ‘poetry of rebellion’ by Peter Riley.
Poetry deformed in translation by Peter Riley.
The Poetry of Autumn, by Peter Riley. Reviewed: Barnett, Jarvis, Simms, Sutherland.
Poetry and the fearful symmetry by Daniel Bosch.
Zoran Music at Dachau by Steven Jaron.
The mosaic of the Transfiguration by Cyril Mango. A commentary on ‘the layers of meaning that the art of the Early Church produced by very simple means’.
Six pages from ‘Lots of Fun with Finnegans Wake’ by Peter O’Brien
Modernist Aesthetics: An Objective Theory by Tronn Overend.
Imran Qureshi by David Nowell Smith.
Peter Lanyon’s ‘Soaring Flight’ by David Nowell Smith.
How’s the Mood-Board? a Rapture by Nigel Wheale.
The Omega Point: a Rapture by Nigel Wheale.
‘Tallys’ and the Postmodern Sublime: a Rapture by Nigel Wheale.
Talking to Jan Harlan about Stanley Kubrick by L.M. Kit Carson.
Somewhere else: A review of New Town Utopia, by Simon Collings.
Nicolas Roeg and the necessity of risk by Anthony Howell.
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives reviewed by Anthony Howell.
Three essays on Romeo and Juliet by Hoyt Rogers.
Dead Heads by Bram Stoker.
The beauty of quantitative easing by Nick O’Hear.
The Work Programme by Ian Bourn.
Pin- and Pencil-Making in the 21st century by Brent Ranali.
DANCE, MUSIC & PERFORMANCE.
Nick Lowe shows up for a friend. by Austin de Lone.
The Funeral of Isaac Albéniz by James Gallant.
Francesco Roberto, From His Diaries by James Gallant.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Modern Nō Theatre by Oswald Sickert. The Japanese get much more out of subtleties of rhythm (or, rather, out of playing hide-and-seek with one simple rhythm) than we do and are correspondingly lax about the interval between one note and another. I don’t believe a European would have thought of dividing the drum beats between two instruments….Every subsidiary detail of the performance possesses, I don’t know how to say, but a solidity. It’s there — God knows how it came there; but there it is, and it’s not a contrivance, not an ‘idea’.
Zorile, Peter Riley’s reflections on Transylvanian melancholy, from Dawn Songs
PHILOSOPHY & EDUCATION.
Modernity and metaphysics, by James Gallant.
How We Knew: Notes at the End of 37 Years in the Classroom. by Harry Guest.
What are perversions by Anthony Howell
The Magdeburg Sphere by Marcel Cohen, translated by Steven Jaron
Montaigne’s ‘Genial Skepticism’ by Robert McHenry.
Simon Blackburn’s On Truth reviewed by Anthony O’Hear.
Pin- and Pencil-Making In the Twenty-First Century by Brent Ranali.
Picturing Language by Jaime Robles.
Duties of care in the study of literature by Alex Wong.
The ‘mental engineering’ of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Alan Wall.
BOOKS & PUBLISHING.
Rejected! by Stephen Wade.
Philosophy of Literary Rejection by Stephen Wade.
Literary Rejection File: Gigs Gone Wrong by Stephen Wade.
Literary Rejection File: Cut With A Dull Blade! by Stephen Wade.
Literary rejection before the invention of slips by Stephen Wade.
Patrons and toadying by Stephen Wade
The Poetry Book Fair’s (not so) free verse. by Anthony Howell.
Keats in the Ninth by Robert McHenry.
See, Infra: An introduction to ‘q.v.’ by Robert McHenry.
Reflections on Walter Benjamin 4 by Alan Wall.
Fear and Loathing in the Royal Festival Hall by Anthony Howell.
The ‘Canonicity’ of Kafka – Reflections on Walter Benjamin 6 by Alan Wall.
Looking up Chinese Metaphysics by Robert McHenry.
The art of the cross-reference by Robert McHenry.
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, ANTHROPOLOGY & TRAVEL.
The glass lantern shattered: Jeremy Bentham and the demise of the Panopticon Prison by Neil Davies.
Thoughts on Germany by Orson Welles.
‘You’d journeyed down from Berlin, and, in a break in the journey, you’d come upon this real, live munitions maker. There he was, with a flower in his button-hole, an Argentine girl at his side, a respectful ring of Swiss bankers all about him, smoking an Havana cigar on the borders of an Italian lake. The eyes in the sharply drawn, solid-looking head, are set in a questing expression. They are the eyes of a shrewd hunter, but you surprise in them a curious pallid emptiness—a dead spot. It is as though the centre of a target were painted white, or like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado.’
The Making of Mugabe by Lance Guma
Ernest Renan by George Saintsbury.
The Obscure Charms of Mme Blavatsky by James Gallant.
The Bedouin of St Katherine
by Hilary Gilbert.
For 1500 years, the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai — the ancient monastery of St Catherine — located at the foot of Mount Sinai has had a staunch ally in the Bedouin of the Sinai. When the local police stood down during the last Egyptian revolution, the Bedouin stood up to protect the monks and their priceless icons and documents. But today, the ‘Bedu feel with good reason that their country is failing them.’ With an update from August 2015: Further notes from South Sinai by Hilary Gilbert.
Balthasar Gracian by E. Grant Duff.
Richard Barnfield by Ed Simon.
La Bièvre, the lost river of Paris. By Zoë Skoulding.
Herbert Palmer by Mark Jones.
Bigotry from Birth by Tom Zoellner.
Spritz at the Villa by Robin Saikia.
The Feast of the Redentore by Robin Saikia.
THEOLOGY.
From the Øιλοκαλíα to Franny’s pea-green book by Andrew Louth.
Against mysticism by Oliver Elton.
Hell…and its abolitions by Alan Wall.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY.
Michelson, Morley and the End of Certainty by Richard Jensen.
Materializations by James Gallant.
Mars by Robert Stawell Ball.
The Martian Calendar by Rev. George D. Lardas.
Thomas Young’s Bakerian Lecture by Christine Simon.
POLITICS, THE PRESS & POLITICAL CULTURE.
Scottish Independence — as seen from Orkney, by Nigel Wheale.
Roger Scruton and ‘the nonsense machine’ by Michael Blackburn.
Caught between history and myth in Austin, Texas’ by Christopher Landrum.
Included: Related material from the Fortnightly’s archive republished in this New Series.
♦
List of Editors & Contributors.
Chronicle & Notices: Our Rolling Register of Shorter Articles, Excerpts from Interesting Books, and Notes from Elsewhere on the Web.
www.fortnightlyreview.co.uk. This site: © 2020 The Fortnightly Review. All rights reserved. Permission requests.
