Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines has written the entries on Jack the Ripper and other serial killers for the New Dictionary of National Biography. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000 was published in 2001.

Suffocating Suspense

Richard Davenport-Hines, 16 March 2000

While other Victorian novelists rested comfortably in the routines that had brought them success in the past, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) was always committed to experimentation. He was his own pitiless taskmaster, working for money as strenuously as a starveling, and received £30,000 from Routledge for a 15-year option on his novels. He wrote successful silver-fork novels like Pelham (1828); historical romances such as Rienzi (1835); an occult novel, Zanoni (1842); a domestic realist novel, The Caxtons (1849); detective thrillers; a science-fiction novel, The Coming Race (1871); a pioneering sociological study, England and the English (1833); 11 volumes of poetry; a history of Athens and translations of Horace and Schiller. He published ten plays: some bombed, but three remained stockpieces throughout the 19th century. The best of these, Money (1840), was revived last June at the Olivier Theatre, where it seemed a curious hybrid of Restoration comedy and Victorian meliorism.

Letter

Only in the Balkans

29 April 1999

In his superb article on Western attitudes to the Balkans, Misha Glenny (LRB, 29 April) declares that Bram Stoker’s Dracula ‘unwittingly reveals an English paranoia’ about invasive foreigners. But in an essay in Signs Taken for Wonders (1988), Franco Moretti has shown that the revelation was far from unwitting. In my cultural history Gothic, published last year, I bolstered Moretti’s reading...
Letter

My dear, the noise

15 October 1998

Surely every schoolboy knows – certainly I was told as a schoolboy – that Lord Sefton was the Guards officer who, having escaped from Dunkirk, and being quizzed about his experiences while drinking at his club, replied: ‘My dear, the noise, and the people.’ Sefton had kept a fixed pose of nonchalance since boyhood, when his sister went mad in front of his eyes in the nursery. George Schlesinger’s...

Take a bullet for the team: The Profumo Affair

David Runciman, 21 February 2013

Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, towards the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun.

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Even before the ship sank the century of progress was pregnant with the Titanic’s fate.

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Allergic to Depths: gothic

Terry Eagleton, 18 March 1999

All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most...

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Concierge

John Lanchester, 16 November 1995

Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and...

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Baring his teeth

Peter Clarke, 25 June 1992

On 10 January 1957 the momentous news reached the family publishing house in St Martin’s Lane. ‘Mr Macmillan has just been made prime minister,’ his elder brother Daniel was...

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