MARY CONWAY applauds the revival of a tense, and extremely funny, study of men, money and playing cards
Faust and furious
GORDON PARSONS recommends the biography of the German polymath whose life provides an interesting take on a revolutionary age
HERALDING THE UNKNOWN: Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull features the Commission of Five submitting the text of the Declaration of Independence. From left to right, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who actually were never in the same room at the same time
MEHDI ACHOUCHE explores the constant fascination of cinema with Marxist alienation from Fritz Lang and Chaplin to Bong Joon Ho
FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
MARY CONWAY applauds the study of a dysfunctional family set in an Ireland that could be anywhere
MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
Goethe: His Faustian Life
AN Wilson, Bloomsbury, £25
AFTER their detailed and in-depth research, biographers may well end up either loving or loathing their subject. There can be no doubt that AN Wilson has great affection for a man he believes a genius and one of the most remarkable figures in modern history, although the character the reader will meet is not one who emerges as altogether admirable.
Like most biographers, Wilson discovers the figure he is looking for. His study presents an “exquisite lyricist, passionate scientist, soulful lover, conservative statesman, [who was] also a wild man, obscene and out of control, foul mouthed, coarse and alcohol fuelled.”
It would not be unfair to suggest that “the prodigious size of the literary output” of this poet and novelist, playwright, scientist, philosopher and even psychologist, who has the kind of standing in Germany that Pushkin has in Russia or Shakespeare in England, is virtually unknown to British readers.
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