Floating it away

Thomas Crump, 7 October 1993

Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan 
by William LaFleur.
Princeton, 252 pp., £24.95, January 1993, 0 691 07405 4
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... distinction between ancestors and hotoke. This trend has now reached the point where all deceased may achieve the status of hotoke, so that the household (whose ritual life is focused on the family altar), not only consists of its present, living members, but also incorporates all those who have given life to it in the past, or who will do so in the ...

Prodigies

Patrick O’Brian, 10 May 1990

The Travels of Mendes Pinto 
by Fernao Mendes Pinto, translated by Rebecca Catz.
Chicago, 663 pp., £39.95, October 1989, 0 226 66951 3
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The Grand Peregrination 
by Maurice Collis.
Carcanet, 313 pp., £12.95, February 1990, 0 85635 850 9
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... notes historical, philological and geographical, and appendices. Yet it is also possible that she may have read too much into her text. She would certainly not be the first specialist to do so; Alice in Wonderland comes to mind, to say nothing of much graver works. In any event, if The Travels of Mendes Pinto was a satire, it was a satire that escaped the ...

Hink Tank

Nicholas Penny, 19 July 1984

The Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks 1933-1963 
edited by John Goldsmith.
Michael Russell, 287 pp., £10.95, May 1984, 0 85955 096 6
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... to read him.’ For some fellow inhabitants of privileged and artistic society the pleasure may not be unmixed. Sir John Pope-Hennessy testifies that Roger was a ‘much kinder, more liberal, more positive person that the diary suggests’. That such virtues were valued by Hinks, even if rarely displayed in his writings, ...

Better than literature

Peter Campbell, 23 April 1992

Native Tongue 
by Carl Hiaasen.
Macmillan, 325 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 9780333568293
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... the moves; pure destruction. By reliably offering such pleasures Hiaasen induces dependence. One may miss the sour bite of bleaker comedy, found in the best crime stories of a more realistic kind, but for entertainment few can match him. Hiaasen’s patch is Florida. Its Everglades and Keys; barracuda, turkey vultures, alligators and panthers do more than ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Arkansas’, 4 June 2020

... to them what sounds like the Apostles’ Creed for criminal underlings: ‘I am the boss. You may never refuse an order and you may never quit. If you decide to run off, I will hunt you down and kill you, no matter how much I’ve grown to like you.’ Later in the movie Vince Vaughn – as Frog, the organisation’s ...

Short Cuts

Duncan Campbell: Courthouse Hotel, 20 May 2021

... has led to thousands of jury trials being delayed by months, even years. People arrested recently may have to wait until the end of next year or even 2023 to have their day in court. Meanwhile, the significant cuts in legal aid introduced in 2012 have driven many defence lawyers out of business. And if all this leads to miscarriages of justice, well, the ...

Short Cuts

Francis FitzGibbon: Criminal Justice after Brexit, 18 May 2017

... operations. In her most substantial contribution to last year’s referendum campaign, Theresa May gave security as the best reason for remaining in the EU. If we left, she said, we would still share intelligence about terrorism and crime with our European allies, and they would do the same with us. But that does not mean we would be as safe as if we ...

In Giza

Carol Berger, 3 March 2016

... signs of torture. As a foreign resident in Egypt, depending on the length of your stay, you may or may not have dealings with the police. The experience is never reassuring. A visit to the local police station to get a stamp on a document for a driver’s licence quickly goes awry. A plainclothes officer ...

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: FUKd, 22 May 2014

... that after full independence there won’t be any Scottish MPs in Westminster. (Actually, there may well be quite a few, but they’ll be representing constituencies in the future UK, or fUK. Just to be clear, from now on when I refer to Scottish MPs, I mean MPs representing Scottish constituencies.) The problematic period is the ten months between the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Les Diaboliques’, 3 March 2011

Les Diaboliques 
directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
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... some suspenseful moments on the way back from Niort when it seems as if the contents of the trunk may be revealed. All is well, though. I mean, all is ill in just the way we want it. So far. Then it turns out there is no body. The pool, drained on a trumped-up pretext, is empty. A promising corpse found in the Seine is not that of Meurisse. His suit ...

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: Cooking for Geeks, 21 November 2013

... for free. Online education is clearly going to be a huge deal for universities; for one thing, it may put quite a few of them out of business. It probably won’t be MOOCs that do that, though. I get the feeling that inside the American university system, their free and open nature makes them seem less of a threat – a threat in business terms – than other ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Breathless’, 22 July 2010

Breathless 
directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
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... films in this list, but most of them show their age far more than Breathless does. Of course we may have forgotten a few details. Like the moment when Jean Seberg admiringly reads to Jean-Paul Belmondo a line from Faulkner’s Wild Palms: ‘Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.’ He replies: ‘Grief is stupid. I choose nothing.’ Or the moment ...

At the V&A

Peter Campbell: Quilts, 22 April 2010

... plain colours the quilts enliven a primary tessellated geometry with patterned patches. Each patch may have its own symmetrical repeats and their position sets up (or breaks) other patterns. A further layer is added to the symmetries if the piece is also quilted – stitched to a backing through a layer of padding. In plain fabric quilts (a good part of the ...

Very Active Defence

Peter Lagerquist: Private Defence, 19 September 2002

... to send any soldiers. It’s better to use someone who wears civilian clothes.’ The difference may be lost on Jerusalem’s Arab residents. In the mid-1990s, UN observers reported that private guards had been involved in seizing Arab houses in East Jerusalem. Knafo insists that his company operates strictly within the law. ‘As far as I know all the ...

The Tooth-Pullers of the Pont Neuf

Will Self: The Art of Dentistry, 29 June 2017

The Smile Stealers: The Fine and Foul Art of Dentistry 
by Richard Barnett.
Thames and Hudson, 255 pp., £19.95, April 2017, 978 0 500 51911 0
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... Bourgery’s ‘Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme’ Children’s dental pain may still be alleviated by a coin substituted for a tooth under a pillow, but for adults in the early modern era the sleight of hand (and mind) required was positively baroque: my mother may have believed many dentists were ...