Napoleon was wrong

Ian Gilmour, 24 June 1993

Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750-1990 
by W.D. Rubinstein.
Routledge, 182 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 415 03718 2
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British Multinational Banking 
by Geoffrey Jones.
Oxford, 511 pp., £48, March 1993, 0 19 820273 3
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Going for Broke: How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds 
by Russell Taylor.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £17.50, April 1993, 0 671 71128 8
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... he relies on comes from income-tax returns: ‘The totals for London and the Home Counties may be taken as convenient shorthand or metaphors for commercial and financial-based incomes generated by the British middle classes, while the totals for Lancashire and Yorkshire may be taken as their equivalent for industrial ...

Exit Sartre

Fredric Jameson, 7 July 1994

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 
by Tony Judt.
California, 348 pp., £11.95, February 1994, 0 520 08650 3
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Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Post-War France 
by Sunil Khilnani.
Yale, 264 pp., £19.95, December 1993, 0 300 05745 8
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... groups), which touches something of a nadir with its opposition to the student rebellion of May 1968. As these writers see it, then, the Seventies are characterised by a rapid decomposition of the Left. I think Khilnani is quite right to identify the signing of the Common Programme of the Left, in 1972, as the crucial moment at which a whole range of ...

Diary

Carolyne Wright: Taslima Nasreen gets them going, 8 September 1994

... succeeded when the Bangladesh Government issued her a new passport in late April 1994. In early May, she flew to Paris for a human rights conference, stopping in Calcutta on her way home. There she gave an interview to a reporter for the English-language daily, the Statesman. The interview, published on 9 May, quoted her ...

Calf and Other Loves

Wendy Doniger, 4 August 1994

Dearest Pet: On Bestiality 
by Midas Dekkers, translated by Paul Vincent.
Verso, 208 pp., £18.95, June 1994, 0 86091 462 3
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... ourselves, and if the mirror is enough of a caricature – not ridiculous, but touching – it may even happen that we prefer the animal to the human being. The fact is that in some respects some animals are even more human than human beings themselves. No human being has such an entreating expression as a basset hound, no human being is as loyal as his ...

Breathing on the British public

Danny Karlin, 31 August 1989

Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism 
by Herbert Tucker.
Harvard, 481 pp., £29.95, May 1988, 0 674 87430 7
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Browning the Revisionary 
by John Woolford.
Macmillan, 233 pp., £27.50, November 1988, 0 333 38872 0
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Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound 
by George Bornstein.
Pennsylvania State, 220 pp., £17.80, August 1989, 9780271006208
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The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry 
by Eric Griffiths.
Oxford, 369 pp., £35, January 1989, 0 19 812989 0
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... or says that the fourth stanza of the poem ‘re-opens the ambiguities of the third’, which it may do in 1842, but not in 1832, where, besides the changes in the text, the order of the stanzas is reversed. Comparing ‘Mariana’ with ‘Mariana in the South’, Tucker states that when the southern Mariana ‘sees images pass her door in stanzas six and ...

Tit for Tat

Margaret Anne Doody, 21 December 1989

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology 
edited by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 555 pp., £20, September 1989, 0 19 811769 8
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... to ‘an Age’. To regard oneself as inhabiting a local, human-made and changeable realm may in some respects be disconcerting: it can also be exhilarating. The very instability presented in acknowledging that one lives at a particular period offers hope for future change, and encourages changes of focus in the present. The mobilities and ...

Poet Squab

Claude Rawson, 3 March 1988

John Dryden and His World 
by James Anderson Winn..
Yale, 651 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 300 02994 2
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John Dryden 
edited by Keith Walker.
Oxford, 967 pp., £22.50, January 1987, 0 19 254192 7
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... who commended it to the King, and some of its polished repartee, as Winn and others have said, may owe something to Rochester. But the song, though as good as Rochester, isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written ...

Sic transit Marshall McLuhan

Frank Kermode, 17 March 1988

Letters of Marshall McLuhan 
edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan and William Toye.
Oxford, 562 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 540594 3
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... there had been a Patristic revival in France around 1800; I don’t know whether this is true; he may have been thinking of Migne, though he was a bit later. He now projected many more books than he ever had time to write – for example, a book on Eliot and, simultaneously, two on popular culture. These last were boiled down by 1951 into one book, The ...

A New Interpretation of Dreams

Jeffrey Saver, 4 August 1988

The Dreaming Brain 
by Allan Hobson.
Basic Books, 319 pp., $22.95, March 1988, 0 465 01703 7
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... to psychoanalytic theory, but does not hesitate to declare its shortcomings. The Dreaming Brain may be seen as an attempt, generally successful, to supplant the analysis of dreams that lies at the core of psychoanalytic theory with a radically different neurophysiological vision, a central challenge to the scientific and psychological foundations of the ...

Too Many Alibis

James Wood: Geoffrey Hill, 1 July 1999

Canaan 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 76 pp., £7.99, September 1996, 0 14 058786 1
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The Truth of Love: A Poem 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Penguin, 82 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 0 14 058910 4
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... verse is alive to the selfishness of how we suffer but vaunt at the same time, and that these may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and ...

‘We do deserts, we don’t do mountains’

Alex de Waal: The United Nations, 11 November 1999

Soldiers of Diplomacy: The United Nations, Peacekeeping and the New World Order 
by Jocelyn Coulon.
Toronto, 231 pp., £26, October 1998, 0 8020 0899 2
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Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention 
edited by Jonathan Moore.
Rowman and Littlefield, 320 pp., £18.95, December 1998, 0 8476 9031 8
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New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in the Global Era 
by Mary Kaldor.
Polity, 200 pp., £13.99, December 1998, 0 7456 2067 1
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... British Army in its Imperial heydey and aftermath. Perhaps when US power has waned somewhat, we may see Americans becoming comfortable with the subject too, and attempting academic analyses of some of the more remarkable feats of precision air attack, such as the strike on the al shiffa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum or the neat destruction of the house ...
... him somewhere (I do not know how seriously) ‘a gifted pupil of Hodgskin’. All Marx’s ideas may indeed have been anticipated – all, that is, save the whole, the transforming synthesis. A contemporary scholar, no less learned than Professor Aarsleff, is reported to have remarked, ‘We do not need Hume,’ because all Hume’s notions could be ...

Mortal Scripts

Christopher Norris, 21 April 1983

Writing and the Body 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Harvester, 142 pp., £15.95, September 1982, 0 7108 0495 4
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The Definition of Literature and Other Essays 
by W.W. Robson.
Cambridge, 267 pp., £19.50, November 1982, 0 521 24495 1
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... In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make reference to figures like Barthes and Derrida, they do so with an air of studied detachment, as if to forestall any charge of deeper complicity ...

Finding a role

Peter Pulzer, 5 September 1985

The Decline of Power: 1915-1964 
by Robert Blake.
Granada, 462 pp., £18, June 1985, 0 246 10753 7
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... May 1915 saw the end of the last purely Liberal government in Britain. October 1964 saw the defeat of the last aristocrat to head a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen ...

Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction 
by Christopher Norris.
Methuen, 247 pp., £16, November 1985, 0 416 39939 8
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Philosophical Profiles 
by Richard Bernstein.
Polity, 313 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 7456 0226 6
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Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism 
edited by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 146 pp., £12.75, November 1985, 0 226 53226 7
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... the wholesale critique of our current literary, political and ideological consensus. This may seem to some, as it does to me, to want to have it both ways. Later on we shall find yet another instance of this bi-fold desire. But it does not prevent Norris’s book from raising a number of important questions. One word of caution. Philosophers, I ...