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Nov 25, 2023 | 
thenation.com | Clare Carlisle
Books & the Arts / Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of despair. In The Sickness Unto Death, the Danish philosopher posed a difficult question: Is despair an essential feature of human life? Ad PolicyThis article appears in the December 11/18, 2023 issue. You’ve probably had the experience—perhaps while listening to music, seeing an old friend, or walking in nature—of feeling as though you’ve reconnected with some deep part of yourself.
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Sep 12, 2023 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Byron York |Clare Carlisle |Nicole Russell
The history of government is the story of bureaucracy. From temples, grain stores, and cuneiform tablets to ministries, standing armies, and the IRS website, the grasp of a government has been shaped by the reach of its bureaucracy. Any change in the nature of the bureaucracy will alter the capacity of the government.
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Sep 7, 2023 | 
newyorkfolk.com | James White |Clare Carlisle
“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” George Eliot wrote those sentences in her 1872 masterpiece, Middlemarch, an examination of marriage unmatched by any other. She scrutinized the relationship—its intimate secrets and its public contours—with rare imaginative and moral intensity in her other fiction too. But that fearsome declaration, uttered by her protagonist Dorothea Brooke, stands out.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
laphamsquarterly.org | Clare Carlisle
During the 1870s George Eliot’s thoughts often turned to the question of biography—some lasting portrait of herself that would be forever associated with her work. People were inevitably curious about her. She found this troubling. One shard of personal experience in Daniel Deronda is Gwendolen’s ambivalence about being looked at: she craves attention and admiration but finds herself painfully judged and controlled by other people’s eyes.
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Aug 4, 2023 | 
lmtonline.com | Clare Carlisle |Becca Rothfeld
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 369 pp. $30 - - - "A marriage is so hideously private," the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote in 1978.
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Jul 26, 2023 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Clare Carlisle
In his presidential address to the Church of England’s General Synod on 7 July the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, caused some controversy with a comment about the Lord’s Prayer. Saying “Our Father” might, he observed mildly, be “problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life”.
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Jul 17, 2023 | 
inkl.com | Clare Carlisle |Allen Lane
But although scholarly interest keeps growing, as far as I can tell no other philosopher has been moved to write a book about Eliot. Here, in her preface, Carlisle tells us why:We could ask why Carlisle chose to embed her discourse in a study of the life and works of the author we have come to know as George Eliot, and not, say, Jane Austen, whose specialty was dissecting unhappy unions with wit and style and guiding her heroines towards happier ones.
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Apr 5, 2023 | 
theguardian.com | Clare Carlisle
Novelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot, is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Yet the Victorian writer wrote seven novels in total, as well as short stories and poems that deserve a look-in too – Eliot’s biographer Clare Carlisle suggests some good places to start. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.
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Mar 23, 2023 | 
penguin.co.uk | Clare Carlisle
Skip to ContentFind your perfect holiday readAn exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage, in art and lifeWhen she was in her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot - an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes - writer, philosopher and married father of three.
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Mar 18, 2023 | 
bookdepository.com | Clare Carlisle
An exceptional new biography that shows how George Eliot wrestled with the question of marriage, in art and lifeWhen she was in her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot - an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes - writer, philosopher and married father of three.
