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Gray’s Elegy

Jonathan Coe, 8 October 1992

Poor Things 
by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 7475 1246 9
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... that ‘the etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.’ Technically the most impressive thing in the book is a 90-page letter from Bella describing her European tour and brutal political education, with the accelerating development of her mind signalled by a transition from sing-song ...

Helio-Hero

J.E. McGuire, 1 June 1989

The Genesis of the Copernican World 
by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Robert Wallace.
MIT, 772 pp., £35.95, November 1987, 0 262 02267 2
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... Nicolas Copernicus’s reform of astronomy delivered a formidable blow to our sense of self in nature. In its effects, Copernicanism probably affected human consciousness more deeply than Darwinism. Published in 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres argued that our earthly globe is not the unique and motionless centre of the great cosmic sphere ...

Top Dog

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 6 December 1990

Nippon, New Superpower: Japan since 1945 
by William Horsley and Roger Buckley.
BBC, 278 pp., £15, November 1990, 0 563 20875 9
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United Nations Human Development Report 1990 
by Mahbub al Haq.
Oxford, 189 pp., £9.95, May 1990, 9780195064810
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Nationalism and International Society 
by James Mayall.
Cambridge, 175 pp., £25, March 1990, 0 521 37312 3
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The International Relations of Japan 
edited by Kathleen Newland.
Macmillan, 232 pp., £40, November 1990, 0 333 53456 5
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... and are prevented by the country’s constitution from arming for any other purpose than immediate self-defence. But their ease has been increasingly disturbed. The United States has wanted to reduce its trading deficit with Japan. It has also been asking Tokyo to make a larger contribution to the wider defence of North-East Asia. By the early Eighties, the ...

Lowry’s Planet

Michael Hofmann, 27 January 1994

Pursued by Furies: A life of Malcolm Lowry 
by Gordon Bowker.
HarperCollins, 672 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 215539 7
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The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry 
edited by Kathleen Scherf.
British Columbia, 418 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7748 0362 2
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... the prospect of becoming his own assembly line, all he could think of was Under Under the Volcano. Robert Lowell writes: I memorised tricks to set the river on fire, somehow never wrote something to go back to. Lowry was the absolute opposite, no tricks and a work he was unable to get away from. He described himself as ‘a sometimes subtle if not good ...

Hard Beats and Spacey Bleeps

Dave Haslam, 23 September 1993

Will Pop Eat Itself? Pop Music in the Soundbite Era 
by Jeremy J. Beadle.
Faber, 269 pp., £7.99, June 1993, 9780571162413
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Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture 
edited by Anthony DeCurtis.
Duke, 317 pp., £11.95, October 1992, 0 8223 1265 4
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... writing seems misty-eyed to the point of simple-mindedness – with LPs reduced to the level of self-help manuals – but DeCurtis is doing no more than articulate the conservatism that lies at the heart of both rock criticism and the music industry. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” and it’s not what they wanted after all. The idea that pop music was ...

Living Doll and Lilac Fairy

Penelope Fitzgerald, 31 August 1989

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 342 pp., £18.95, June 1989, 0 7195 4688 5
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Lydia and Maynard: Letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes 
edited by Polly Hill and Richard Keynes.
Deutsch, 367 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 233 98283 3
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Mazo de la Roche: The Hidden Life 
by Joan Givner.
Oxford, 273 pp., £18, July 1989, 0 19 540705 9
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Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership 
by Jean Kennard.
University Press of New England, 224 pp., £24, July 1989, 0 87451 474 6
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Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists 
by Susan Leonardi.
Rutgers, 254 pp., $33, May 1989, 0 8135 1366 9
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The Selected Letters of Somerville and Ross 
edited by Gifford Lewis.
Faber, 308 pp., £14.99, July 1989, 0 571 15348 8
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... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...

Thousands of Little White Blobs

Daniel Pick, 23 November 1989

The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti 
by J.S. McClelland.
Unwin Hyman, 343 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 04 320188 1
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... keeps emerging: their crowds are in constant need of surveillance and policing; the desperate self-imposed task of the theorist is to reduce the crowd’s protean qualities to manageable positive laws, to master the irrational through ‘the social defence’ of science and reason. The point was not, as today, to give out identity cards thereby to ...

When Dad Came Out Here

Stephen Fender, 12 December 1996

Bad Land: An American Romance 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 325 pp., £15.99, October 1996, 0 330 34621 0
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... at this ingratitude, but his own account suggests ample cause for it. The trouble was that self-appointed experts from further east were forever telling the independent-minded settlers what was best for them. Eastern Montana was apparently so empty, so devoid of physical and social culture, that it could serve as the laboratory for any harebrained ...

Why the hawks started worrying and learned to hate the Bomb

John Lewis Gaddis: Nuclear weapons, 1 April 1999

The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons 
by Jonathan Schell.
Granta, 240 pp., £9.99, November 1998, 1 86207 230 2
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... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...

Lamb’s Tails

Christopher Driver, 19 June 1986

All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present 
by Stephen Mennell.
Blackwell, 380 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 631 13244 9
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Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the 14th Century including ‘The Forme of Cury’ 
edited by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler.
Oxford, for the Early English Text Society, 224 pp., £6.50, April 1985, 0 19 722409 1
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The English Cookbook 
by Victor Gordon.
Cape, 304 pp., £12.50, November 1985, 0 224 02300 4
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... Anglo-Norman cuisine diverged from its French counterpart. Moreover – and this underlies a self-imposed limitation in the scope of All Manners of Food – neither French nor English cookery (let alone Italian or Spanish) can be properly understood without taking into account the extra-European influences upon which all relied in different degrees. As ...

Lacking in style

Keith Kyle, 25 February 1993

Divided we stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis 
by W. Scott Lucas.
Hodder, 399 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 340 53666 7
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Blind Loyalty: Australia and the Suez Crisis 
by W.J. Hudson.
Melbourne, 157 pp., £12.50, November 1991, 0 522 84394 8
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... was prepared to think in terms less of reproach than of damage limitation. But British plans (and self-defeating British secrecy) dictated, first, that scarcely anything should start before the ultimatum expired, and secondly, that no airborne invasion from Cyprus be attempted before the seaborne reinforcements had arrived from Malta. The allies thus ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... corroboration of the great conspiracy against goodness. Almost as monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up private life. It proves he was right about everything, and it regains him (immediately) his wife’s love and respect and sexual ...

Defensive, Not Aggressive

Andrew Cockburn: Khrushchev’s Cuban Gambit, 9 September 2021

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game 
by Theodore Voorhees.
Michigan, 384 pp., £27.95, September, 978 0 472 03871 8
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Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, April, 978 0 241 45473 2
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... 1990s, this indisputable record revealed that all previous insider accounts were both wrong and self-serving. Far from being the voice of reason, Bobby Kennedy had been belligerent to an almost hysterical degree, urging not only attacks on the offending missile sites but a full-scale invasion of Cuba – even though, as his own diaries show, he knew that ...

The Beast He Was

Tim Parks: ‘Kapo’, 26 May 2022

Kapo 
by Aleksandar Tišma, translated by Richard Williams.
NYRB, 306 pp., £14.99, August 2021, 978 1 68137 439 0
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... to God and to fate. Sredoje is disappointed by what he reads. ‘Fräulein, whom he had known as self-assured to the point of obduracy, was suddenly revealed to be fragile to the point of helplessness in the face of life.’ Tišma focuses on the link between libido and violence and the ways in which it played out during the struggle for survival of the ...

A Big Life

Michael Hofmann: Seamus Heaney, 4 June 2015

New Selected Poems 1988-2013 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 222 pp., £18.99, November 2014, 978 0 571 32171 1
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... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...

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