Their Witness

Donald Davie, 27 February 1992

The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe 
edited by Daniel Weissbort.
Anvil, 384 pp., £19.95, January 1992, 0 85646 187 3
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... Mihalic (Croat) and Vasko Popa (Serb) are ‘Yugoslav’. This is excusable. And the Greeks, it may be thought, have looked out for themselves; also, less certainly, the Russians. But what have the Bulgars done wrong? And haven’t the Israelis looked after their own interests as efficiently as the Greeks after theirs? This is no way to start reviewing a ...

Boeotian Masters

Donald Davie, 5 November 1992

The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 360 pp., £18.95, September 1992, 0 85635 976 9
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... essay’. As he became famous, he got above himself, became portentous. But although this may be true, the crucial change is simply in the quality of the writing. Murray the reviewer had dash and decisiveness, and also generosity. He wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1975 a review of Auden’s Thank you, Fog which is also an obituary. After ...

What-it’s-like-ness

Hilary Putnam, 8 February 1996

Mental Reality 
by Galen Strawson.
MIT, 337 pp., £24.95, January 1995, 0 262 19352 3
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... one might argue that whatever the nature of the problem of ‘explaining what-it’s-like-ness’ may be (if it is a genuine problem at all), it cannot be a problem for physics because physics concerns itself only with factors needed to predict the trajectories of particles and fields, and Strawson has given no reason to think that the additional ideas which ...

Don’t forget the primitive

Mary Beard, 20 August 1992

Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War 
by Dudley Young.
Little, Brown, 379 pp., £16.99, May 1992, 0 356 20628 9
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... humanity. Greek language, etymology, rituals, the scattered fragments of the Dionysiac tradition, may all play their part in this project of recuperation. In fact, Young laments the ‘decline’ of Hellenic studies in this country – and, with that decline, the loss of those collective dreams of the primitive past that we can experience only through the ...

Phew!

E.S. Turner, 11 June 1992

Sunny Intervals and Showers: Our Changing Weather 
by David Benedictus.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £14.99, April 1992, 0 297 81154 1
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... weather is not clear, but no matter). Some of the information in the book, as the author admits, may be useful for settling bets in pubs. A chapter on weather lore contains all the old saws one could possibly want, and more. It is odd that, when the writers of old guidebooks so often talked about seaside airs being ‘elastic’, there was never a jingle on ...
The Economic Legacy 1979-1992 
edited by Jonathan Michie.
Academic Press, 384 pp., £25, March 1992, 0 12 494060 9
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The Godley Papers: Economic Problems and Policies in the 1980s and 90s 
by Wynne Godley.
New Statesman and Society, £2
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Full Employment in the 1990s 
by John Grieve Smith.
Institute for Public Policy Research, 68 pp., £7.50, March 1992, 1 872452 48 5
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... longer period. Godley’s use of charts (see, for instance, the papers dated 11 January and 17 May 1991) will readily convey to the non-specialist reader in how spectacular a manner this performance was worse in almost every respect than in earlier periods: the growth rate exceptionally low, the rise in unemployment exceptionally rapid, the amplitude of ...

Latent Discontent

W.G. Runciman, 11 June 1992

Solidarity and Schism: ‘The Problem of Disorder’ in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology 
by David Lockwood.
Oxford, 433 pp., £48, March 1992, 0 19 827717 2
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... exercised him over more than three decades. This said, the way in which he has chosen to do it may deter readers who are not, and have no wish to be, versed in backward-looking disputes between rival commentators over well-worn texts. Why, such readers may ask, does Professor Lockwood not go straight to his own answers ...

How to Read the Trump Dossier

Arthur Snell, 5 January 2017

... to the public of what that strategy might be. The DGSE could try to suborn another member of May’s team to provide corroboration, but this is risky and could expose both the DGSE and their contact. At the heart of this game of betrayal is trust: the source of the intelligence must be trusted by his or her handler. The reader of the intelligence report ...

On Chile

Tony Wood, 3 November 2022

... Chilean political establishment. The discredit of the main political parties carried over into the May 2021 elections for the Constitutional Convention. The People’s List, a loose coalition of independents, finished third with 16 per cent of the vote, ahead of the main centre-left alliance and only narrowly behind the left-wing bloc formed by Gabriel ...

Give her a snake

Mary Beard, 22 March 1990

Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions 
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
Bloomsbury, 338 pp., £16.95, February 1990, 0 7475 0093 2
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... Cooper could not escape the paradox Hughes-Hallett so neatly exposes: that the myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap. The real hero of the story of Cleopatra is, of course, the snake. Hughes-Hallett (in a rare lapse from her ...

Short Cuts

Lana Spawls: Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba, 21 June 2018

... to provide a safe service for patients. Empty shifts are covered either by agency workers, who may be unfamiliar with the hospital, or by doctors who feel pressured into working extra shifts (and in doing so break their contractual maximum of 72 hours a week). Too often shifts are left unfilled, even for extended periods such as maternity leave, making it ...

Short Cuts

William Davies: Reasons to be Cheerful, 18 July 2019

... Note that the quality Johnson’s fans most applaud in him is cheerfulness, something Theresa May was never going to offer, suggesting that she may have missed the point of Brexit all along. The summer has taken on a carnivalesque quality; normal constraints around public speech have been suspended for the duration of a ...

They might be giants

Richard Fortey: Classical palaeontology, 2 November 2000

The First Fossil Hunters: Palaeontology in Greek and Roman Times 
by Adrienne Mayor.
Princeton, 361 pp., £22, May 2000, 0 691 05863 6
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... Even older fossils have been recovered, including bones of exotic relatives of the giraffe which may date from twenty million years ago. Then there are giant hyenas, as well as bears, hippos and rhinoceroses. Greece and its islands in fact lay at a kind of crossroads for mammal evolution over millions of years, the evidence of which is entombed in the rock ...

We stop the words

David Craig: A.L. Kennedy, 16 September 1999

Everything you need 
by A.L. Kennedy.
Cape, 567 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 224 04433 8
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... on an island off the Welsh coast. Here writers live in a community paid for by a trust. They may write, they may not. They may find, or they may destroy, themselves. Each is obliged to undertake seven Main Events, a kind of DIY ordeal, under the ...

Northern Laughter

Karl Miller: Macrone on Scott, 10 October 2013

The Life of Sir Walter Scott 
by John Macrone, edited by Daniel Grader.
Edinburgh, 156 pp., £65, February 2013, 978 0 7486 6991 2
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... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...