Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8Show More
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“... coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the ...”

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5Show More
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“... him a visibility at odds with the solitude and simplicity he craved. One reason he moved with his young family from Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More
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“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... antiquities at Sotheby’s and head of modern painting. When Magnus Linklater took over as editor, David Sylvester, my neighbour and great friend, who had been art adviser, offered his resignation. So suddenly there wasn’t an art adviser. Bruce was at a terribly low ebb. He’d been working for ages on the book which eventually came out as The Songlines. He ...”

Gentlemen’s Spleen

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen: Hysterical Men, 27 August 2009

Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness 
by Mark Micale.
Harvard, 366 pp., £19.95, December 2008, 978 0 674 03166 1Show More
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“... two differences. In Huston’s version, one of the doctors attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and ...”

Jack in the Belfry

Terry Eagleton, 8 September 2016

The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy and Betrayal in Georgian England 
by Elizabeth Foyster.
Oneworld, 368 pp., £20, September 2016, 978 1 78074 960 0Show More
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“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

On a par with Nixon

Stephen Alford: Bad Queen Bess?, 17 November 2016

Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I 
by Peter Lake.
Oxford, 497 pp., £35, January 2016, 978 0 19 875399 5Show More
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years 
by John Guy.
Viking, 494 pp., £25, May 2016, 978 0 670 92225 3Show More
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“... prince, has been slipping. The woman modern scholarship gives us has been neatly summed up by David Cannadine: ‘A workaday regnant queen, shorn of her glitter and her gold, her glamour and her greatness, with a false face, a disturbed psyche, a heart of stone, a barren womb and feet of clay; and as such a woman trying to do a man’s job, but not always ...”

Rapture in Southend

Stefan Collini: H.G. Wells’s​ Egotism, 27 January 2022

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 256 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 23997 1Show More
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“... to find conventional, unresponsive and boring. Before long, he fell in love with Amy Catherine, a young science student who was capable of sharing in his literary and scientific interests if not of matching his sexual appetite. They married in 1895 and had two sons. This marriage lasted until her death in 1927 and it seems wise not to rush to judgment about ...”

Goofing Off

Michael Hofmann: Hrabal’s Categories, 21 July 2022

All My Cats 
by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson.
Penguin, 96 pp., £7.99, August 2020, 978 0 241 42219 9Show More
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“... in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly – by the heroine, who happens to be Hrabal’s mother, Marie, is the tail of a dog. This was the 1920s, and suddenly ...”

Walking like Swinburne

P.N. Furbank, 12 July 1990

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant 
by Philip Hoare.
Hamish Hamilton, 463 pp., £20, June 1990, 0 241 12416 6Show More
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“... appearance, his jewels and magenta lipstick and gold-dusted hair. In the year of the Bright Young Things and their parties, those parties dear to our imagination from Vile Bodies, Stephen Tennant, arriving in his Edwardian electric brougham, dressed perhaps in a football jersey and earrings, became a star attraction, rivalled only by Brian Howard. There ...”

Down with DWEMs

John Sutherland, 15 August 1991

ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education 
by Charles Sykes.
St Martin’s, 304 pp., $9.95, December 1989, 0 312 03916 6Show More
Tenured Redicals: How politics has corrupted our Higher Education 
by Roger Kimball.
HarperCollins, 222 pp., $9.95, April 1991, 0 06 092049 1Show More
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“... stock of American humanity (the latest census reveals that ethnic minorities, particularly in young age groups, are growing explosively). The recent attack on universities was triggered by freshman requirements at an élite West Coast university. Allegations that the Western Culture course at Stanford was ‘racist’ began to surface in 1986. Like other ...”

The Chop

John Bayley, 27 January 1994

A History of Warfare 
by John Keegan.
Hutchinson, 432 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 09 174527 6Show More
How Great Generals Win 
by Bevin Alexander.
Norton, 320 pp., £22, November 1993, 9780393035315Show More
The Backbone: Diaries of a Military Family in the Napoleonic Wars 
edited by Alethea Hayter.
Pentland, 343 pp., £18.50, September 1993, 1 85821 069 0Show More
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“... at a crucial moment, demanding if his legionaries intended to let these rebel ‘boys’, like the young Cato, overthrow him. Hitler’s record in the First World War was that of a junior NCO who really enjoyed it; and even in the Second he loved discussing with young officers such things as the best way to site an 88mm ...”

Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9Show More
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“... to Robert Harris, with the memorable line: ‘Fuck Dacre, publish.’ Meanwhile the historian David Irving denounced the diaries as fakes, on the radio and television of three countries, although he had no sound evidence for saying so. Two weeks later, when everyone else was saying they were fakes, he made the front page of the Daily Express and the Times ...”

Did more mean worse?

Michael Brock, 23 October 1986

Government and the Universities in Britain: Programme and Performance 1960-1980 
by John Carswell.
Cambridge, 181 pp., £19.50, January 1986, 9780521258265Show More
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“... defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most serious result of the under-representation of secondary education on the ...”
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