A captivating history of obsessive collectors: from ancient looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents, Freudian psychos, and hoarders.
Collectors are often praised for their taste in art or contributions to science, and considered great public benefactors. But collectors have also been seen as dangerous obsessives who love objects too much. Why? From looters and idolaters to fin de siècle decadents and Freudian psychos, A Noble Madness is a captivating history of obsessive collectors from ancient times to today.
From Roman emperors lusting after statues to modern-day hoarders, award-winning author James Delbourgo tells the extraordinary story of fanatical collectors throughout history. He explains how the idea first emerged that when we look at someone’s collection, we see a portrait of their soul: complex, intriguing, yet possibly insane. What Delbourgo calls “the Romantic collecting self” has always lurked on the dark side of humanity.
But this dark side has a silver lining. Because obsessive collectors are driven by passion, not profit, they have been countercultural heroes in the modern imagination, defying respectability and taste in the name of truth to self.
A grand portrait gallery of collectors in all their decadent glory, A Noble Madness recounts the saga of the human urge to accumulate, from Caligula to Marie Antoinette, Balzac to Freud, Norman Bates to Andy Warhol. Collectors’ love of objects may be mad, even dangerous. But we want to believe their love’s a noble madness because by expressing that love, they are themselves.
London Group of Historical Geographers seminar, Institute of Historical Research, online, 18 November 2025, 5.30pm. Registration required.
Rahel Jaeggi, Progress and Regression, trans. Robert Savage, Harvard University Press, July 2025
Despite widespread technological innovation, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and strides toward gender and racial equity, few believe that humanity is on the road of progress. Indeed, many are increasingly skeptical of the very notion of progress, seeing it as the stuff of hollow political speeches.
Nevertheless, this impassioned book argues that we are lost without a shared idea of progress. In the tradition of critical theory, Rahel Jaeggi defends a vision of progress that avoids Eurocentric and teleological distortions. Progress here is not an inevitable developmental trend but a kind of compass directing society’s never-ending journey toward emancipation. A nimble practitioner of dialectical reasoning, Jaeggi revitalizes progress by confronting its opposite: regression. Her analysis—sober and thoughtful, but urgent—reckons with the myriad signs of regression today, including growing inequality, ecological destruction, and above all the assault on educational institutions, critical thinking, and reason itself.
The task of imagining a human solidarity capable of transcending difference and promoting universal welfare has seldom been more pressing—or more complex. Progress and Regression is an indispensable resource for those ready to take up the challenge.
The formal end of the Leverhulme major research fellowship for the Indo-European thought project was at the end of September, but I have a no-cost extension until the end of January. This is invaluable, and is effectively to extend the grant for the months I lost in 2023 when I was in hospital and then off work recovering. I am on research leave in 2025-26, and am planning to use the first half of the year to try to complete this project. The second half will be to work on the new edition and translation of Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic.
The main writing task since the summer has been finishing the draft of the chapter on Dumézil’s ‘bilan’ period of consolidation and summary, which he worked on from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. I say a bit more about what books of his this included in the last update. I also discuss his retirement, his visiting posts in the United States at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Chicago and UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his replacements at the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études. I then moved to a discussion of his Esquisses de mythologie series, and some of his other late books from the 1980s, including a book on Nostradamus and Socrates, and a republication of parts of Colonel de Polier’s Mythologie des Indous. The plan is this should then lead into a discussion of some of the legacies of Benveniste and Dumézil’s work.
Unitobler, Bern Universität, the Sprachwissenschaft library and the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek
I was back in Paris for a few days in September, continuing work on Benveniste’s archives at the Bibliothèque nationale. I also made a short trip to Switzerland. Last year I went to Geneva and Fribourg, and this trip was to Bern, via Zurich. In Bern, I went to the Swiss Literary Archives, to look at letters from Georges Dumézil to Georges Redard, and some from Dumézil and Benveniste to Jean Bollack. (Benveniste’s letters to Redard are at the Collège de France.) The Dumézil-Redard correspondence is quite extensive, over thirty years, and helped with some details I was trying to track down. I also went to the Bern University library, which has Benveniste’s personal collection of books in the linguistic collection. Unlike some of the other book collections I’ve looked at, these books have been subsumed into the main library collection, and are on open shelves. There isn’t a list of the books currently available, so it was a bit trial and error through the catalogue and on the shelves to find books which once belonged to him. They have a sticker (or less often, writing) to say “Ex Libris Emile Benveniste”. Not worth a trip on its own, but combined with the Literary Archives it was interesting. I write about one of the dedications I found, from Jean de Menasce, here.
In October, I was pleased to have an invitation to Brown University, to give the 2025 Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture in the Department of Comparative Literature. I gave a talk with the title “Émile Benveniste, the Second World War and the Making of the Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions”, drawing on substantial parts of this book manuscript. It was a very nice event for me, and I’m grateful to Kenneth Haynes and his colleagues for the invitation and hospitality. I combined it with a few days in Cambridge to visit the Jakobson archives at MIT again, and the Gordon and Tina Wasson papers at the Harvard University Herbaria.
The archival work for this project is coming to an end. I am running out of funding and time, and am also getting very close to the limit of days I can be in the Schengen area (another reason to curse ‘Brexit’…). I’ll be back in Paris for a few days, trying to finish up the archival work I can. In early 2026 I will be spending two months at the European University Institute in Florence as a Fernand Braudel fellow, based in the History department. I’m hoping to take a complete draft of this book manuscript with me, and to return with a better one.
Wolff wrote two of his books which he was a prisoner of war in a camp in Austria, and I wrote about some of the other books written by French professors under these conditions, and the informal universities set up in some of the camps. There are a lot of stories to tell, and this might be the focus of some future pieces too.
There are a few other pieces I’m developing for this series, including ones on Huguette Fugier and Clémence Ramnoux, and on Gordon and Tina Wasson [now here], which I expect will be out this year. I’m now confident I will hit the goal of an essay every week through 2025. The series has been fun for me, perhaps especially when writing this book manuscript has been challenging.
Previous updates on this project can be found here, along with links to some research resources and forthcoming publications. The re-edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna is available open access. There is a lot more about the earlier Foucault work here. The final volume of the series is The Archaeology of Foucault,and the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society I co-edited on “Foucault before the Collège de France” has some important contributions on the earlier parts of Foucault’s career, and is partly available free to access. My recent articles include “Foucault, Dynastics and Power Relations” in Philosophy, Politics and Critique and “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity” in Journal of the History of Ideas (both require subscription, so ask if you’d like a copy); and “Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France” in History of European Ideas (open access). The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
The Swiss-French geographer Claude Raffestin died earlier this year.
Juliet Fall has a tribute to him here, and Sage have made some articles by or about him available open access until the end of 2025.
These articles are mainly from a special section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space from 2012, put together by Francisco Klauser from a workshop we organised at the University of Durham. That section included pieces by Klauser, Fall, Alexander B. Murphy, Claudio Minca, and a piece commissioned by Raffestin, translated by Samuel Butler.
In addition, an earlier piece by Fall and another piece by Raffestin from other Sage journals are included in this virtual theme issue, also made open access.
Juliet and her Geneva colleagues have a tribute in French here. Not much else of Raffestin’s important work has been translated into English, but I know these other pieces – they require subscription, unfortunately:
Update: more of his work in French is here, much open access. Thanks to Ed Draper at Sage, Kate Derickson at Environment and Planning D: Society and Space for agreeing to do this virtual theme issue and Juliet for the tribute.
I wrote an endorsement of Elaine’s book, and this copy was sent by the publisher. Duke University Press kindly send a copy of Hage’s book on Bourdieu. The others were bought, with the Duby ones second-hand. Foucault’s 1972 course is reviewed by Leonhard Riep in the next issue of Foucault Studies, alongside a piece by me on what else is revealed by the University at Buffalo archives about his two visits there. There is a shorter summary here. I’m working on a short piece about Ramnoux for the Sunday Histories series; an earlier piece looked at one aspect of Bourdieu’s career.
A fascinating and moving history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil in the two world wars
Why do societies only remember their own national war dead? Today, the enemy dead might be largely hidden from view, but this wasn’t always the case. During both world wars, Germans and Britons died in their thousands in enemy territory. From Berlin to Bath, London to Leipzig, civilian communities buried the enemy in the closest parish churchyard. Perhaps surprisingly, local people embraced these graves, often caring for them with considerable tenderness.
Tim Grady explores the history of this curious aspect of postwar community. He reveals how, as the two states moved bodies to new military cemeteries, local people protested at the disturbance of the dead, and ties between the bereaved families and those who cared for the graves were severed forever. With the enemy out of sight and mind, the British and Germans concentrated solely on commemorating their own war dead, and their own sacrifices. Today’s insular public memory of the world wars was only made possible by clearing away signs of the enemy—allowing people to tell themselves much simpler narratives of the recent past as a result.
Examines and animates the geographical ethics of Spinoza’s philosophy
Animated by contemporary ethical and political concerns, from the rights of nature in Ecuador to British political satire
Harnesses conceptual innovation across geography, philosophy and the geohumanities
Advances the revitalisation of interest in Spinoza across contemporary human geography
Foregrounds the geophilosophy at the heart of Spinoza’s metaphysics
Harnessing the enigmatic and radical philosophy of Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza, this book examines and animates the occluded geography beating at the heart of his work. Essays attending to matters of space, nature, hope, aesthetics and politics recast the Dutch rationalist in geographical terms, spotlighting Spinoza’s re-thinking and re-writing of earth and world. Advancing a renaissance in Spinozist scholarship, the book argues that Spinoza offers conceptual techniques to better apprehend and negotiate the affects and passions catalysing twenty-first century societal, environmental and political transformation. The stakes of a geographical Spinoza, for ethics, politics, ecology and thought itself, could not be higher.
CFP: XIV Michel Foucault International Colloquium – 50 years of The History of Sexuality, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil, 26-29 May 2026
1. OVERVIEW The XIV Michel Foucault International Colloquium: 50 Years of the History of Sexuality will be held in person from May 26 to 29, 2026, at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
The Organizing Committee invites submissions of proposals for Oral Communications in Thematic Symposiums (TSs) and for Panel Exhibition Sessions, under the terms described below.
• Thematic Symposiums (TSs) will take place in the afternoons of May 26–28, 2026. • Panels will be on display from May 26 to 28, with presentation sessions scheduled within this period.
Deadline for proposals is 30 November 2025, for panels 10 November. All the details at Foucault News
In two previous pieces in the ‘Sunday Histories’ series, I have discussed the planned but unrealised collaboration between Vladimir Nabokov and Roman Jakobson on an edition and translation of “The Song of Igor”, an old Russian poem of the 12th century. Jakobson had first led a collaborative seminar on the text at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York City during the Second World War, producing a largely French collection La Geste du Prince Igor’, published in 1948. This book included, among other things, an edition of the text, French and English translations, and a long essay by Jakobson demonstrating the text’s authenticity. The particular reason Jakobson was motivated to produce this edition, and especially his essay, was to challenge André Mazon’s 1940 claim that the text was a later forgery.
In “Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, Marc Szeftel and The Song of Igor“ I outlined the plans for the edition of the text by Jakobson and the translation by Nabokov, with a historical commentary by Szeftel. But I also discussed the acrimonious break down of relations between Jakobson and Nabokov and the abandonment of the plan. The idea of a collaboration had developed after Nabokov wrote a review of La Geste du Prince Igor’, which he struggled to get published. They then agreed that Nabokov would produce a new translation, which would be accompanied by Jakobson’s edition of the text and some other writings. This was a project which they worked on in early-mid 1950s. But in 1957 Nabokov broke off the collaboration, and published his translation alone in 1960. In that edition, Nabokov says that his original translation, which he dates to 1952, was
purely utilitarian—to provide my students with an English text. In that first version I followed uncritically Roman Jakobson’s recension as published in La Geste du Prince Igor. Later, however, I grew dissatisfied not only with my own—much too ‘readable’—translation but also with Jakobson’s views. Mimeographed copies of that obsolete version which are still in circulation at Cornell and Harvard should now be destroyed (p. 82 n. 18).
In “Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Jakobson, and The Song of Igor – other sources for the story of a failed collaboration“ I added a bit more detail to this story, in particular making use the Nabokov-Edmund Wilson letters, which were published as the book Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya,and also the Nabokov archives in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library. That collection has the typescript of the published translation by Nabokov, with handwritten corrections. It also has some of the Nabokov-Jakobson correspondence, which interestingly is almost all in English. Fortunately, Nabokov kept carbon copies of his letters to Jakobson as well as those he received. Szeftel’s correspondence with Nabokov and Jakobson has been published, but most of the Nabokov-Jakobson letters have not. The one exception, to my knowledge, is the 14 April 1957 letter which broke off the collaboration, in the Berg collection, which was published in Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977 (p. 216). But the Berg collection does not have a copy of the earlier translation which was planned to be part of the Jakobson-Nabokov edition.
The corridor outside the Distinctive Collections reading room at MIT
The earlier Nabokov translation is, however, in the Jakobson archives held by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which can be consulted in the Distinctive Collections reading room. I had visited this archive once before, but with largely different questions in mind – I was at that time particularly interested in Jakobson’s correspondence with Émile Benveniste and Alexandre Koyré. I was back for some other reasons, mainly concerning some of Jakobson’s early work in the United States (on which more here and here), and so also requested the boxes relating to The Song of Igor.Boxes 11 and 12 of the Jakobson archives have a lot of material – reading notes, correspondence, drafts, and images. There are a few different translations including Samuel H. Cross’s version which is in La Geste du Prince Igor’ (box 11, folder 80); and one by Sidney Monas, which was published in 1971 with Burton Raffel named as co-translator (folder 81; see Raffel’s 1986 reflections on this translation). Horace Lunt’s translation of the first 25 verses, compiled from the versions produced for Harvard’s ‘Russian 203’ course, is in the same box (folder 15). But it was Nabokov’s early version which I really wanted to see (folders 82-84). Clearly Jakobson did not follow Nabokov’s 1960 directive that this “obsolete version… should now be destroyed”.
The first folder (number 82) has a typed version of the translation and notes, which is indicated to be edited by Jakobson. That has the addition “Translated by Vladimir Nabokov”, which I think is in Jakobson’s handwriting. The second folder (83) has another typescript, in carbon copy and original, which incorporates those changes. The third folder (84) has a different style typescript of the translation alone, which textually looks the same as the corrected version, but which has some further emendations in pencil and ink, mostly on the first page. For the most part this looks like a clean and final form.
The first of these folders also includes a letter from Nabokov to Pascal Covici of Viking Press, 2 June 1951, saying that while the entire manuscript of the volume is not yet complete, he was sending his translation as a preview. He hoped to improve it, but suggested that it was more or less there. He said the volume would contain his translation, foreword and translation notes; Jakobson’s edition of the original text and its recension; papers by Jakobson and Szeftel on linguistic and historical aspects; bibliography and index; and illustrations of Old Russian miniatures and other images. While this accords well with other sources, it was interesting to see how closely Nabokov’s vision for the volume matched with Jakobson’s, at least in 1951. This folder also includes a nine-page “Translator’s Foreword”. There is an index of names mentioned in the poem, keyed to the line numbers of the translation, and a concluding note. This note mentions Mazon’s attempt to prove the text was a fake, and gives Nabokov’s clear indication that he supported Jakobson’s demonstration that this view was false. Nabokov praises La Geste du Prince Igor’ as a “remarkable volume”, and that “Roman Jakobson, with the utmost precision, analyses and annihilates Mazon’s fancywork”. The problem of words which were believed to be unique to the poem, not being in other old Russian texts (i.e. what is known as hapax legomenon), were either subsequently found in manuscripts discovered later, or were convincingly demonstrated to be legitimate. Nabokov endorses Jakobson’s view that far from Mazon’s assessment that the forger had insufficient knowledge of the language, and therefore erred in his forgery, Mazon’s claims rather demonstrated his own insufficient knowledge.
Box 12, folder 1 of Jakobson’s archives contains four typed pages of some suggested changes to the translation, which appear to be from Jakobson to Nabokov. A letter from Nabokov to Jakobson, dated 19 January 1953 (box 12, folder 9), lists thirteen misprints which he asks are corrected before proofs are produced. This seems to indicate that they were, at this stage, largely content with the text itself. But the delays in producing the other texts for their planned edition seems to have given Nabokov time to doubt his work, and for the falling out with Jakobson to occur. There are quite large differences between this translation and the 1960 published version. The immediately striking thing is that the earlier translation is in prose, short paragraphs usually of one sentence each. The published version is displayed as short lines of verse. Comparing them line by line would be interesting, but really ought to be done by someone who knows the Russian original. In particular, a fuller comparison would need not just to look at the two different translations, but to explore how they are translations of different source texts – Jakobson’s recension for the first and the Russian text Nabokov later preferred for the second. In his published foreword, Nabokov complains that “No satisfactory edition of The Song exists in Russian” (p. 19) and describes La Geste du Price Igor merely as “useful” while criticising Cross’s translation within it as “a poor English version… more or less patched up by the editors” (p. 20).
An unexpected postscript to this story came from the correspondence between William J. McGuire and Jakobson, also in box 12, folder 9. McGuire was writing Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past, and was contacting people in his research on the foundation. I read that book a while ago because I was interested in Mircea Eliade’s attendance at Eranos seminars, which were organised by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and Carl Jung, and funded by the Mellon family. The Bollingen Foundation – named after Jung’s tower on Lake Zürich – published the Yearbooks from the seminars in its series, as well as Jung’s collected works in English and many other books, including some of the early Eliade translations. The Bollingen Foundation also funded research by Eliade and Georges Dumézil – in the latter case his trip to Peru and work on Quechua. (On the seminars, there is a detailed account in Hans Thomas Hakl, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century.)
The Bollingen series had agreed to publish the Jakobson-Nabokov edition of The Song of Igor, with a contract signed in April 1953 (McGuire, Bollingen, p. 258). This postdates Nabokov’s letter to Viking Press, so it seems this was a later development of the work. Researching his book, McGuire wrote to Jakobson on 12 February 1979 asking for some information about various things, including the history of “Igor Tale” project. Jakobson wrote a detailed reply back on 23 February 1979, in which he briefly outlined the story from his perspective. Nabokov had died in July 1977, but McGuire had already interviewed both him and his widow in Montreux (see Bollingen,p. 342), and provides a balanced account (pp. 258-59). In his first letter to McGuire Jakobson describes Nabokov’s version of the text as based on different commentaries, which he says are incompatible, and the result as a “completely unscholarly, I would even say antischolarly translation of the Igor Tale” (23 February 1979). McGuire says that Jakobson recruited first Dimitri Obolensky and then Omeljan Pritsak to do an alternative translation for his planned edition, but neither produced a text. It is extraordinary that this short text – about 3,000 words, 43 generously spaced pages in the printed version by Nabokov or ten typed sides in the last archival version of the earlier translation – could have caused so much difficulty.
One thing which developed from this correspondence with McGuire is that Jakobson says that the original photographs intended for the edition had been given to the Bollingen Foundation, and from them to Princeton University Press when it took over the Bollingen series in the late 1960s. McGuire is able to track them down, and on 15 March 1979 says he can send them back to Jakobson. Those images seem to be part of the sequence of photographs in box 12, folders 4-8 of the Jakobson archive.
It is interesting that on 14 May 1979, thanking McGuire for finding the photographs and asking for their return, Jakobson says “I have not yet abandoned the plan of an up-to-date Igor Tale book”. This is twenty-two years after his project with Nabokov had failed. But Jakobson died three years later, and this project was never completed.
References
La Geste du Prince Igor’: Épopée Russe du douzième siècle, ed. and trans. Henri Grégoire, Roman Jakobson and Marc Szeftel, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Jakobson’s parts are reprinted in his Selected Writings IV: Slavic Epic Studies, The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1966, 106-300.
The Song of Igor’s Campaign: An Epic of the Twelfth Century, trans. and foreword by Vladimir Nabokov, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Hans Thomas Hakl, Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, trans. Christopher McIntosh, London: Routledge, 2013.
Roman Jakobson, “The Puzzles of the Igor’ Tale on the 150th Anniversary of its First Edition”, Speculum 27, 1952, 43-66; reprinted in Selected Writings IV: Slavic Epic Studies, The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1966, 380-410.
André Mazon, Le Slovo d’Igor, Paris: Librairie Droz, 1940.
William McGuire, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Sidney Monas and Burton Raffel trans. “The Tale of Igor’s Men: Of Igor Son of Svyatoslav, Grandson of Oleg”, Delos[first series] 6, 1971, 5-15.
Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977, eds. Dmitri Nabokov & Matthew J. Bruccoli, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky, Berkeley: University of California Press, revised and expanded edition, 2001.
Burton Raffel, “The Manner of Boyan: Translating Oral Literature”, Oral Tradition 1 (1), 1986, 11-29.
Marc Szeftel, “Correspondence with Vladimir Nabokov and Roman Jakobson”, in Galya Diment, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997, 103-119.
This is the 45th post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Thanks to dmf for the links. Shame about the prohibitive price.
Alberto Beneduce, a prominent banker, policy-maker and technocratic institutions’ builder, held immense power as Fascist Italy’s chief banker from 1925 to 1940. Most importantly, he was Mussolini’s financial advisor and a key member of his inner circle of officers. Few historical eras have elicited more scholarly attention and discussion than fascism; totalitarian political ideology remains a dynamic topic and continues to exercise a powerful hold on scholarly enquiry. Nonetheless, further studies on the role played by individuals holding governmental powers under dictatorships should be undertaken to better grasp the political phenomenon of totalitarianism. Previous studies have primarily focused on Alberto Beneduce’s contributions to economic and administrative history, but this volume offers the first comprehensive scholarly examination in English of Beneduce’s political and ideological positions and aims to shed light on the broad interplay between knowledge, power, economics and the political elite in Fascist Italy. Utilizing original archival material, this research presents new evidence on Beneduce’s evolution as a politician, scholar, and financier. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, it sheds new light on his pivotal role within Mussolini’s inner circle, making a substantial contribution to ongoing debates about technocracy and its function in authoritarian regimes.
This book will be of interest to researchers of Italian fascism, administrative and economic history.
