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The Real Karl Marx

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NYBooks Logo. Link to Homepage My Account Logout Site logo Politics Collapse Literature Collapse Arts Collapse Ideas Collapse Current Issue Current Issue More from the Review Events All Issues About Us Shop Literary Gifts Shop NYRB Classics The Real Karl Marx John Gray Jonathan Sperber’s ‘Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life’ May 9, 2013 issue Reviewed: Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber Liveright, 648 pp., $35.00 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde Karl Marx and his daughter Jenny, a left-wing journalist and her father’s secretary, in 1869. ‘The cross she is wearing,’ Jonathan Sperber writes, ‘was not a sign of religious affiliation but the symbol of the Polish uprising of 1863.’ In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today: The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for ...
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Dante’s Dogs

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  Dante’s Dogs Alberto Manguel Angry, greedy, savage, mad, cruel: these are the qualities that Dante seems to see in dogs and applies to the inhabitants of Hell. March 10, 2015 Tate, London William Blake: Cerberus ; from his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy , 1824-1827 Of all the insults and derogatory comparisons Dante uses in the Commedia on both lost souls and evil demons, one recurs throughout. The wrathful, according to Virgil, are all “dogs.” From then on, in his travel notes through the kingdom of the dead, Dante echoes his master’s ancient vocabulary. Thus, Dante tells us that the wasteful in the seventh circle are pursued by “famished and fast black bitches”; the burning usurers running under the rain of fire behave “like dogs who in the summer fight off fleas and flies with their paws and maw”; a demon who pursues a barrater is like “a mastiff let loose,” and other demons are like “dogs hunting a poor beggar” and crueler than “the dog with the hare it has caught.” ...
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