I wish she’d been a dog

Elaine Showalter, 7 February 1991

Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart 
by Charlotte Margolis Goodman.
Texas, 394 pp., $24.95, May 1990, 0 292 74022 0
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Jean Stafford: A Biography 
by David Roberts.
Chatto, 494 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7011 3010 5
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... American writer deserving revival, but they take very different approaches to her life and work. David Roberts was mesmerised by this ‘enigmatic, thwarted writer’ and sought to unravel her story with the help of Eve Auchincloss, Stafford’s friend and editor, and her 42-year correspondence with ex-lover and friend Robert Hightower. He paints a ...

In a Dry Place

Nicolas Tredell, 11 October 1990

On the Look-Out: A Partial Autobiography 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 85635 758 8
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In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 296 pp., £18.95, September 1990, 0 85635 877 0
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... the Charing Cross Road’. Occasionally, the day’s work done, he goes to pubs and meets poets: David Wright, ‘a literary instrument of precision’, and a long-time friend and supporter; Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very ...

Two Men in a Boat

Ian Aitken, 15 August 1991

John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister 
by Bruce Anderson.
Fourth Estate, 324 pp., £16.99, June 1991, 9781872180540
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‘My Style of Government’: The Thatcher Years 
by Nicholas Ridley.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 09 175051 2
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... every few minutes the room would erupt with laughter, usually at some bleary-eyed sarcasm from David Davis. Francis Maude, laughing louder than anyone, would then restore everyone to order.’ On the other hand, Mr Anderson neatly decapitates a few enemies. One of them is the unfortunate David Shaw, MP for Dover, who is ...

Gangs

D.A.N. Jones, 8 January 1987

The Old School: A Study 
by Simon Raven.
Hamish Hamilton, 139 pp., £12, September 1986, 0 241 11929 4
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The Best Years of their Lives: The National Service Experience 1945-63 
by Trevor Royle.
Joseph, 288 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 7181 2459 6
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Murder without Conviction: Inside the World of the Krays 
by John Dickson.
Sidgwick, 164 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 9780283994074
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Inside ‘Private Eye’ 
by Peter McKay.
Fourth Estate, 192 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 947795 80 4
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Malice in Wonderland: Robert Maxwell v. ‘Private Eye’ 
by Robert Maxwell, John Jackson, Peter Donnelly and Joe Haines.
Macdonald, 191 pp., £10.95, December 1986, 0 356 14616 2
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... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

Jane Austen 
by Tony Tanner.
Macmillan, 291 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 333 32317 3
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... maintained’. The implication is that a real picture of the author, like the one on the front of David Cecil’s study, would not do justice to the image that Tanner has formed of her, the geist that he requires. If we have Mrs Abington in place of Jane Austen, why not a Stendhal heroine instead of Elizabeth Bennet, so that ‘by showing the different ways ...

Death by erosion

Paul Seabright, 11 July 1991

Medical Choices, Medical Chances: How patients, families and physicians can cope with uncertainty 
by Harold Bursztajn, Richard Feinbloom, Robert Hamm and Archie Brodsky.
Routledge, 456 pp., £12.99, February 1991, 0 415 90292 4
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Examining doctors: Medicine in the 1900s 
by Donald Gould.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, June 1991, 0 571 14360 1
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Some Lives! A GP’s East End 
by David Widgery.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 248 pp., £15.95, July 1991, 1 85619 073 0
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... care teams, and should not assume’ that they have a right to ‘control all health affairs’. David Widgery’s Some Lives! is not directly about medicine, though his profession as a GP is what provides his perspective on the East End of London whose neglect and decay during the Eighties he angrily records. Most of his book is ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
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Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
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Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
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American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
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Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
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Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
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... for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A serial murder occurs when one or more ...

Into the sunset

Peter Clarke, 30 August 1990

Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain 
edited by J.C.D. Clark.
Macmillan, 271 pp., £40, July 1990, 0 333 51550 1
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The Philosopher on Dover Beach 
by Roger Scruton.
Carcanet, 344 pp., £18.95, June 1990, 0 85635 857 6
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... But his development of this appeal to recent history does not turn out very happily. He cites David Marquand as an influential exponent of the view that Britain’s cultural conservatism in the 20th century was the result of an ossification of the values of liberal capitalist individualism which had served their turn and had had their day. ‘Such a view ...

Crossed Palettes

Ronald Paulson, 4 November 1993

Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in 18th-Century England 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 312 pp., £40, July 1993, 0 300 05741 5
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... he was writing a history of theory, partly because the painters did not correspond to the theory. David Solkin’s Painting for Money returns the painters to the story. Hogarth is here as well as other anti-civic humanist painters, and there is even a spokesman for the opposition to Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville. But Mandeville is presented as an isolated ...

Rhythm Method

Jenny Diski, 22 September 1994

R.D. Laing: A Biography 
by Adrian Laing.
Peter Owen, 248 pp., £25, August 1994, 0 7206 0934 8
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... and running. Laing had founded a group known as the Philadelphia Association along with Esterson, David Cooper, Clancy Sigal and Sid Briskin, and these men formed the core group of loving brothers. The idea had been to find a house in which people could live while in the throes of a psychotic episode, where the process of madness could run its course without ...

Sublimely Bad

Terry Castle, 23 February 1995

Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock 
by Eliza Fenwick, edited by Isobel Grundy.
Broadview, 359 pp., £9.99, May 1994, 1 55111 014 8
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... good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly demoralising Millenium Hall (1762), on the supposed consolations of living in a ...

Purple Days

Mark Ford, 12 May 1994

The Pugilist at Rest 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 571 17134 6
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The Sorrow of War 
by Bao Ninh, translated by Frank Palmos.
Secker, 217 pp., £8.99, January 1994, 0 436 31042 2
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A Good Scent from Strange Mountain 
by Robert Olen Butler.
Minerva, 249 pp., £5.99, November 1993, 0 7493 9767 5
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Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 
by David Wyatt.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £35, February 1994, 9780521441513
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... character in Apocalypse Now mournfully observes; but one sometimes wonders. In Out of the Sixties David Wyatt argues that Vietnam remains ‘the defining thing, our war, our story’, and he compares it to an iceberg, ‘a mostly submerged history that cruises through our dreams’. Oddly though, he in the end makes very few connections between the work of ...

Vanishings

Peter Swaab, 20 April 1989

The Unremarkable Wordsworth 
by Geoffrey Hartman.
Methuen, 249 pp., £8.95, September 1987, 0 416 05142 1
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Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement 
by David Simpson.
Methuen, 239 pp., £25, June 1987, 0 416 03872 7
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Romanticism in National Context 
edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich.
Cambridge, 353 pp., £30, June 1988, 0 521 32605 2
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Romantic Affinities: Portraits from an Age 1780-1830 
by Rupert Christiansen.
Bodley Head, 262 pp., £16, January 1988, 0 370 31117 5
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... are perceived’, and it’s this faculty which malfunctions in Hartman’s more fanciful flights. David Simpson’s central subject is indicated by Hartman’s passing remark about Wordsworth’s ‘residual agrarian sensibility’. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination is his second book on Wordsworth, following and complementing Wordsworth and the Figurings ...

Protestant Country

George Bernard, 14 June 1990

Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher 
edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £27.50, January 1989, 0 521 34034 9
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The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation 
by Robert Whiting.
Cambridge, 302 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 521 35606 7
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The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485-1603 
by Stanford Lehmberg.
Princeton, 319 pp., £37.30, March 1989, 0 691 05539 4
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Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Weidenfeld, 271 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 297 79343 8
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The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries 
by Patrick Collinson.
Macmillan, 188 pp., £29.50, February 1989, 0 333 43971 6
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Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing 
by John Sym, edited by Michael MacDonald.
Routledge, 342 pp., £29.95, February 1989, 0 415 00639 2
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Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 
by Nigel Smith.
Oxford, 396 pp., £40, February 1989, 0 19 812879 7
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... in 1650 was marked by Royal Oak Day – 29 May. By drawing profusely on churchwardens’ accounts, David Cressy attempts to illustrate the relative impact of these occasions – though it is not always clear what, if anything, can be concluded from differences in payments. Such difficulties are not overcome by the author’s tendency to slip into ...

Last Farewells

Linda Colley, 22 June 1989

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution 
by Simon Schama.
Viking, 948 pp., £20, May 1989, 0 670 81012 6
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The Oxford History of the French Revolution 
by William Doyle.
Oxford, 466 pp., £17.50, May 1989, 0 19 822781 7
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The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution 
by David Bindman.
British Museum, 232 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 0 7141 1637 8
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... undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his excellent catalogue of the exhibition, was ‘to establish in British consciousness, in place of the myriad complexities of the real French Revolution, a series of simple pictures and stereotypes which have proved virtually ...