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End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

Worlds Apart 
by David Holbrook.
Hale, 205 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 9780709033639
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Story of My Life 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 188 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 7475 0180 7
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Forgotten Life 
by Brian Aldiss.
Gollancz, 284 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 0 575 04369 5
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Incline Our hearts 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 241 12256 2
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... dominant image. For him, the present rot can be traced directly to the 1960s: specifically to Richard Neville’s Play Power, with its demonic slogan ‘the weapons of revolution are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as ...

Über-Tony

Ben Pimlott: Anthony Crosland, 3 September 1998

Crosland’s Future: Opportunity and Outcome 
by David Reisman.
Macmillan, 237 pp., £47.50, October 1997, 0 333 65963 5
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... Affairs in 1964-65, Crosland advocated the devaluation of sterling: but his opinion did not carry weight, and devaluation was postponed. His promotion to the job of Education Secretary gave him much more scope. His vision was bold. He was under no illusions about the necessity for reforming a school system which he saw as ‘divisive, unjust and ...

Clashes and Collaborations

Linda Colley, 18 July 1996

Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present 
by Denis Judd.
HarperCollins, 517 pp., £25, March 1996, 9780002552370
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Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Cambridge, 400 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 0 521 43211 1
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Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 
by Anthony Pagden.
Yale, 244 pp., £19.95, August 1995, 0 300 06415 2
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... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...

Fat is a manifest tissue

Steven Shapin: George Cheyne, 10 August 2000

Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne 
by Anita Guerrini.
Oklahoma, 304 pp., $25.95, February 2000, 0 585 28344 3
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... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...

Gold-Digger

Colin Burrow: Walter Ralegh, 8 March 2012

Sir Walter Ralegh in Life and Legend 
by Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams.
Continuum, 378 pp., £25, February 2012, 978 1 4411 1209 5
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The Favourite: Sir Walter Ralegh in Elizabeth I’s Court 
by Mathew Lyons.
Constable, 354 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 84529 679 7
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... or thirty times the annual income of a schoolmaster. By the later 1580s Ralegh had acquired enough weight to throw it around. In 1587 he wrote to the warden of All Souls telling the college to hand over some woodlands in Middlesex to a kinswoman of his. Ralegh swaggeringly raps the knuckles of the low-life dons: the queen ‘greatly disdayned to wryte twyse to ...

What Wotan Wants

Jerry Fodor, 5 August 2004

Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s ‘Ring’ 
by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht.
Oxford, 241 pp., £14.99, April 2004, 0 19 517359 7
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... What could possibly be down there? Two new fish have risen to this bait. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending proceeds from their conviction that ‘Wagner’s libretto, ponderous and mannered though it may sometimes seem (and be), is charged with life and significance.’ They therefore propose ‘to probe its philosophical and ...

Promises aren’t always kept

Jenny Diski: Goblin. Hobgoblin. Ugly Duckling, 8 October 2015

... within three weeks of taking a ‘very moderate dose, of the weakest steroid they make’, my weight had shot from eight stone to eleven stone. Fat that feels as if my body has been stuffed with some alien gel settled in particular places. My face and body have rounded. Cushing’s syndrome. The shock I get from an ill-advised glance into a looking-glass ...

Britain’s Thermonuclear Bluff

Norman Dombey and Eric Grove, 22 October 1992

... which went into service in 1949. It was long and streamlined unlike the short fat B-4 but its weight of around ten thousand pounds and its size meant that it was unsuitable for the RAF’s only available jet bomber, the Canberra. Blue Danube did not go into operation with the RAF’s first V-bomber squadrons until 1956. Meanwhile work at Aldermaston was ...

Eating people

Claude Rawson, 24 January 1985

Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the ‘Mignonette’ 
by A.W.B. Simpson.
Chicago, 353 pp., £21.25, July 1984, 0 226 75942 3
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... was purely contingent: any non-cannibal form of ‘necessity’ would legally have been of equal weight or non-weight, and the subsequent ‘authority’ of this legal precedent has presumably been confined to non-cannibal cases. In July 1884 the sea-going yacht Mignonette sank in the South Atlantic, midway between St ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...

Grand Old Sod

Paul Driver: William Walton, 12 December 2002

The Selected Letters of William Walton 
edited by Malcolm Hayes.
Faber, 526 pp., £30, January 2002, 0 571 20105 9
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William Walton: Muse of Fire 
by Stephen Lloyd.
Boydell, 332 pp., £45, June 2001, 9780851158037
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William Walton, the Romantic Loner: A Centenary Portrait Album 
by Humphrey Burton and Maureen Murray.
Oxford, 182 pp., £25, January 2002, 0 19 816235 9
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... the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th century. But it is dramatically broken-backed. Its performing forces are massive; its timescale – it lasts roughly thirty ...

Des briques, des briques

Rosemary Hill: On British and Irish Architecture, 21 March 2024

Architecture in Britain and Ireland: 1530-1830 
by Steven Brindle.
Paul Mellon, 582 pp., £60, November 2023, 978 1 913107 40 6
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... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...

During Her Majesty’s Pleasure

Ronan Bennett, 20 February 1997

... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...

Terrestrial Thoughts, Extraterrestrial Science

Bernard Williams, 7 February 1991

Realism with a Human Face 
by Hilary Putnam.
Harvard, 347 pp., £23.95, October 1990, 0 674 74950 2
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... Veterans of Foreign Texts.) The question is, how much can be made of realism? How much theoretical weight can it be given? Putnam thinks that it comes in just two basic forms. ‘Metaphysical realism’ is the view that we can conceive of the world in some way quite independent of our own theories and the terms in which we describe it, and raise the question ...

Kindness rules

Gavin Millar, 8 January 1987

A Life in Movies 
by Michael Powell.
Heinemann, 705 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 9780434599455
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All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema 
edited by Charles Barr.
BFI, 446 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 85170 179 5
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... and natural gifts. His mother told the story of watching him as a boy trying to lift too heavy a weight and muttering, in the words of Theseus: ‘If my heart comes out of my body it shall come up.’ Powell’s self-assessments are disarmingly plentiful and that may be counted one of the strengths of the book. Of his brother, about to die of peritonitis at ...

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