Mrs Thatcher’s Universities

Peter Pulzer, 22 June 1989

“... much to criticise in the way the Government is treating the universities. It must bear a major share of the blame for the recent impasse. But the exam boycott was wrong in principle and wrong in practice, and wrong in practice because wrong in principle. The Vice-Chancellors, whatever tactical errors they may have committed, are not 19th-century ...”

Fixing it for heredity

Raymond Fancher, 9 November 1989

The Burt Affair 
by Robert Joynson.
Routledge, 347 pp., £25, August 1989, 9780415010399
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“... pages of rebuttal only this time under Burt’s name. The second example dates from 1963, when John McLeish’s book The Science of Behaviour charged (almost a decade before Kamin) that Burt had inadequately described his twin studies, and called his research methodology ‘shocking’. Burt promptly ran a scathing and nitpicking review, three times longer ...”

Beyond the ‘New History’

Theodore Zeldin, 16 March 1989

The Identity of France. Vol I: History and Environment 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 432 pp., £20, December 1988, 0 00 217773 0
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“... greeted enthusiastically abroad, did the French public become aware that they had a historian of major importance among them. It was only when a television series was made about his work that he became a national figure. At the Collège de France, he was outside the university system. At the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (the defiantly modern monument he ...”

Acapulcalypse

Patrick Parrinder, 23 November 1989

Christopher Unborn 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alfred MacAdam.
Deutsch, 531 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 233 98016 4
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The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories 
edited by Nick Caistor.
Faber, 188 pp., £11.99, September 1989, 0 571 15359 3
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Hollywood 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 543 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 9780233984957
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Oldest living Confederate widow tells all 
by Allan Gurganus.
Faber, 718 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571142019
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“... The action spans fifteen years, from the end of the Depression to the advent of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Vidal keeps track of the major political developments but concentrates on the inter-generational conflicts between Burden and Blaise and their respective children. From time to time a famous politician ...”

Diary

Robert Morley: Give me a Basher to travel, 20 March 1986

“... with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them bought heavily into Rockwell. The new offer ‘A Young Girl’s Dream’ is now available at £12.45 and ...”

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Alan Taylor, Oxford Don, 8 May 1986

“... at the speech day of one of Magdalen’s schools and had regaled the boys with a history of the major benefactors of the college (and thus of the school), showing that all of them had acquired their wealth by foul means and had had enough left over to buy themselves indulgences through their benefaction: the moral being that if you hear that ‘crime never ...”

Sexual Whiggery

Blair Worden, 7 June 1984

The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in 17th-Century England 
by Antonia Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 544 pp., £12.95, May 1984, 0 297 78381 5
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Family Life in the 17th Century: The Verneys of Claydon House 
by Miriam Slater.
Routledge, 209 pp., £10.50, March 1984, 0 7100 9477 9
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“... women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is her decision to draw so little on the imaginative literature of the time. Simple and obvious questions ask themselves. Why is there so large a gap between the depressed condition of women apparently prescribed by sermons and ...”

What can be done

Leo Pliatzky, 2 August 1984

Government and the Governed 
by Douglas Wass.
Routledge, 120 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 7102 0312 8
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“... administrative hierarchy. I myself needed no persuading of the wrong-headedness of the campaign by John Hoskyns (who is not mentioned in the lecture) for politicisation of Civil Service appointments, and I think that others will also find the arguments convincing. The lecture describes the close working relationship that can exist between a minister and a ...”

Saying yes

Rupert Wilkinson, 19 July 1984

“... fashion they celebrate collective traditions while legitimating competitive struggle. The major party Conventions mark the midway stage of the election. And so, while sounding full of fight and confident of victory, the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election ...”

Venisti tandem

Denis Donoghue, 7 February 1985

Selected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Viking, 204 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 670 80040 6
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Palladas: Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Anvil, 47 pp., £2.95, October 1984, 9780856461279
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Men and Women 
by Frederick Seidel.
Chatto, 70 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2868 2
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Dangerous play: Poems 1974-1984 
by Andrew Motion.
Salamander, 110 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 907540 56 2
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Mister Punch 
by David Harsent.
Oxford, 70 pp., £4.50, October 1984, 0 19 211966 4
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An Umbrella from Piccadilly 
by Jaroslav Seifert and Ewald Osers.
London Magazine Editions, 80 pp., £5, November 1984, 0 904388 75 1
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“... ascribing a multitude of experiences to one figure has been vigorously maintained, especially by John Berryman in Dream Songs, though in that case the necessary distinction between ‘Henry’ and Berryman didn’t survive the strain he put on it. In the end, Berryman overwhelmed his creation by falling upon him. Harsent has given his puppet a busy life: he ...”

Joseph Jobson

Patrick Wormald, 18 April 1985

Saladin in his Time 
by P.H. Newby.
Faber, 210 pp., £10.95, November 1983, 0 571 13044 5
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Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War 
by Ronald Finucane.
Dent, 247 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 460 12040 9
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“... makes enlightening reading for the Westerner. (For the Israelis, who have already produced several major Crusade scholars, it is of course of more pressing relevance.) It is, truly, an amazing story. At the end of the 11th century a European army, which may originally have numbered no more than thirty-five thousand, and which was much reduced by ...”

Come here, Botham

Paul Foot, 9 October 1986

High, Wide and Handsome. Ian Botham: The Story of a Very Special Year 
by Frank Keating.
Collins, 218 pp., £10.95, June 1986, 0 00 218226 2
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“... the record straight about him. He has followed Botham’s astonishing 1985 season through every major match, describing and assessing each achievement. No one is better qualified to do that. For my money, Keating is the country’s top sports writer by a long distance (and there are many other good ones). He writes pretty well about any sport, but cricket ...”

The Labile Self

Marina Warner: Dressing Up, 5 January 2012

Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe 
by Ulinka Rublack.
Oxford, 354 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 0 19 929874 7
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“... and imitated ‘superior’ Italian humanism. In this she is following the lead of the late John Hale, whose last book, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, let the Danube School of artists, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, share space with Leonardo et al. Rublack’s quest has taken her to fascinating primary sources in German ...”

Keep yr gob shut

Christopher Tayler: Larkin v. Amis, 20 December 2012

The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin 
by Richard Bradford.
Robson, 373 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 1 84954 375 0
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“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: The 1956 Polio Epidemic, 7 May 2020

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”