1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 letters@the-tls.co.uk 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 Cover image: Sun Setting over a Lake, c.1840 by J. M. W. Turner © Tate Images; p4 © Popperfoto/Getty Images; p8 © Sunset Boulevard/Corbis; p9 © Mondadori Portfolio/akg-images; p12 © Moises Saman/Magnum Photos; p14 © Rue Des Archives/Writer Pictures; p17 © Sam Drake/Tate Britain; p18 © Tony Larkin/Rex Features; p19 © The Bridgeman Art Library; p20 © iStockphoto/Getty Images; p23 © The Bridgeman Art Library; p24 © akg-images; p25 © The Kobal Collection; p30 © Tony Duffy/ALLSPORT/Getty Images The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly except for 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. USA and Canadian retail newsstand copies distributed by Kable Distribution Services, 14 Wall Street, Suite 4C New York, New York 10005 TLS OCTOBER 10 2014