reflections on the revolution in france and other writings

“A Heart That Works” tells the story of Henry’s life and Delaney’s grief. He spent much of his life in hospitals, and died before he turned three. Shortly after Delaney’s son Henry turned one, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. “Despite the obvious talents of its author,” one reviewer wrote, the over-all effect was “a bit thin.” And yet “The Easy Life” is constructed with the same torqued intensity as all her fiction, seeding the problems that will eventually become Durassian preoccupations: the anguish of poverty, the vertigo of young love, the pull of biological conformity, and the struggle of women to reconcile the requirements of feminine competence with the disorganizing effects of sexual desire.

The book sold out on its first printing, but its critical reception was lukewarm. In a style differing from the bald obliquity that characterizes Duras’s more famous books and films, feelings and adjectives stick together like plums that have fallen from a tree and formed a putrid mass. Here, Duras’s sentences assume a voluptuousness that Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan do a remarkable job of translating. We cannot understand the defects of the modern world, or modern politics, without him.“La Vie Tranquille” (1944), Duras’s second novel-translated into English as “ The Easy Life”-is a coming-of-age story that dwells on what a young woman must relinquish to the activity of tidying up life. Burke’s wisdom, Norman shows, applies well beyond the times of empire to the conventional democratic politics practised in Britain and America today. In this absorbing new biography Conservative MP Jesse Norman gives us Burke anew, vividly depicting his dazzling intellect, imagination and empathy against the rich tapestry of 18th century Europe. This he predicted, would trigger extremism, terror and the atomisation of society – a profound analysis that continues to resonate today. He warned of the effects of British rule in Ireland, the loss of the American colonies, and most famously, he foresaw the disastrous consequences of revolution in France. Amid the 18th century’s golden generation that included his companions Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon, Burke’s controversial mixture of conservative and subversive theories made him first a marginal figure, and finally a revered theorist – a hero of the Romantics.

Reflections on the revolution in france and other writings