Consider Jack and Oskar

Michael Rossi: Twin Studies, 7 February 2013

Born Together – Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study 
by Nancy Segal.
Harvard, 410 pp., £39.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 05546 9
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... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...

Fs and Bs

Nicholas Hiley, 9 March 1995

Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen 
by Adrian Weale.
Weidenfeld, 230 pp., £18.99, May 1994, 0 297 81488 5
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In from the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy 
by Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh.
Oxford, 554 pp., £22.50, July 1994, 9780198252344
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... in wartime, despite the rediscovery of patriotism by the British intelligentsia. Cecil Day Lewis, Graham Greene and George Orwell all undertook patriotic work for the BBC or for the Ministry of Information, and led the new celebration of British culture. As E.M. Forster declared in 1940, it now appeared that this culture was ‘genuinely ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... The South Wales union leadership was similarly disappointed in 1983, after a stay-down strike at Lewis Merthyr colliery in February gained little support. In a foreshadowing of the events of the next year, pickets met with hostility in Nottinghamshire and only South Wales overwhelmingly backed strike action when a national ballot was called, with only half ...

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6
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Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1
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... If Britons wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...

No Shortage of Cousins

David Trotter: Bowenology, 12 August 2021

Selected Stories 
by Elizabeth Bowen, edited by Tessa Hadley.
Vintage, 320 pp., £14.99, April 2021, 978 1 78487 715 6
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The Hotel 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 256 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08065 8
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Friends and Relations 
by Elizabeth Bowen.
Anchor, 224 pp., $16, August 2020, 978 0 593 08067 2
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... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters 
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7
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... At times the sexuality of women’s bodies elicits oddly visceral effects: ‘I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.’ ‘I had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me at the 1st H. Ball. They ...

Sod off, readers

John Sutherland, 26 September 1991

Rude Words: A Discursive History of the London Library 
by John Wells.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £17.50, September 1991, 0 333 47519 4
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Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English 
by Geoffrey Hughes.
Blackwell, 283 pp., £16.95, August 1991, 0 631 16593 2
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... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...

The HPtFtU

Christopher Tayler: Francis Spufford, 6 October 2016

Golden Hill 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 344 pp., £16.99, May 2016, 978 0 571 22519 4
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... tricks of voice and tone to worry about replicating the bullying quality he identifies in C.S. Lewis’s writing, and after illustrating an argument he’ll step back to concede that a particularly seductive passage might add up to little more than ‘a special effect in prose, controlled by me’. When he expounds his subjects’ thinking from the ...

Bullets in the Mail

Krithika Varagur: After Khashoggi, 3 June 2021

The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia 
by Madawi Al-Rasheed.
Hurst, 394 pp., £20, December 2020, 978 1 78738 379 1
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... al-Rasheed spent a chapter analysing the output of a pseudonymous Islamist activist known as Lewis Atiyat Allah. I monitor an anonymous, well-sourced Twitter account called @mujtahidd for news about MBS. Al-Rasheed’s narrative in this book sometimes verges on rumour and hearsay. At one point she describes a theory about King Faisal’s assassination in ...

Joke Book?

A.D. Nuttall, 23 November 1989

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Vol. I 
by Robert Burton, edited by Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair.
Oxford, 675 pp., £70, October 1989, 0 19 812448 1
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... knows what this means). Christ Church, the college of Burton and Corbett, is also the college of Lewis Carroll. Although Burton himself characterised his work with the terms ‘Menippean’, ‘macaronic’, ‘cento’, none of these is offered as a straight description. One can almost say that the Anatomy is jokingly described as a joke, and that this was ...

Members’ Memorial

G.R. Elton, 20 May 1982

The History of Parliament: The Commons 1558-1603 
edited by P.W. Hasler.
HMSO, 1940 pp., £95, February 1982, 0 11 887501 9
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... more narrowly. This rather cosy story of politics and parties received a severe jolt in 1929 when Lewis Namier posed the question why men entered Parliament and answered that, at least in the middle of the 18th century, they mostly did so for reasons that had nothing to do with party or politics. This opened the psephological era of Parliamentary history ...

Nudge-Winking

Terry Eagleton: T.S. Eliot’s Politics, 19 September 2002

The ‘Criterion’: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain 
by Jason Harding.
Oxford, 250 pp., £35, April 2002, 9780199247172
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... exclusivist as the Nazi state which in Eliot’s eyes helped to spell its ruin. It represented, as Thomas Mann understood, a disabling sublimation of the spirit that left actual human life perilously open to the assaults of barbarism. Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist ...

Every single one matters

Elaine Showalter and English Showalter: The first black female novelist?, 18 August 2005

In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’ 
edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Hollis Robbins.
Basic Books, 458 pp., £17.50, January 2005, 0 465 02708 3
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... epigraphs, and brief quotations from other British writers, including Wordsworth, Byron and Monk Lewis. Robbins expands her analysis in In Search of Hannah Crafts, a collection of 23 essays on the book and its context which she has edited with Gates. The Dickens connection is, as she argues, substantial; Crafts used Bleak House as a source for ...

Lennon’s Confessions

Russell Davies, 5 February 1981

... much else) of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, then wholesale later on. It read like a ready amalgam of Lewis Carroll, nursery rhymes and the Goons, though Lennon himself located its centre of gravity elsewhere. ‘I went through my Dylanesque period a long time ago with songs like “I am the Walrus”,’ he remarked in last year’s Playboy interview: ‘the ...

Owning Mayfair

David Cannadine, 2 April 1981

Survey of London. Vol. 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2. The Buildings 
edited by F.H.W. Sheppard.
Athlone, 428 pp., £55, August 1980, 0 485 48240 1
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... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...