One of Those Extremists

Seth Anziska: Golda Meir, 13 July 2023

The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power 
by Pnina Lahav.
Princeton, 376 pp., £28, November 2022, 978 0 691 20174 0
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... time to leave America. ‘Not knowing much about contemporary Palestine,’ Lahav writes, ‘she may have imagined Zion as an empty land waiting to be redeemed by idealistic Jewish pioneers.’ As Lahav says, Meir must have been aware of the work of the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘frontier thesis’ saw settler colonialism as a ...

Socialism without Socialism

Peter Jenkins, 20 March 1986

Socialist Register 1985/86: Social Democracy and After 
edited by Ralph Miliband, John Saville, Marcel Liebman and Leo Panitch.
Merlin, 489 pp., £15, February 1986, 9780850363395
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... to restore the forward march of British labour which began to falter thirty years ago.’ This may not seem a very startling conclusion, even for 1978: the thesis that Labour was in electoral decline had already been well documented by Ivor Crewe and his colleagues at the University of Essex, while others of us, sympathetic to the radical right wing of the ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: In Washington, 7 February 1991

... with the region, some regard for it seems obligatory for American citizens. However ill it may sound when proceeding from the lips of George Bush, internationalism has a clear advantage in rhetoric and principle over the language of America First. The irony has been that, in order to make their respective cases, both factions have had to exaggerate the ...

A Minor Irritant to the French Authorities

Fred Halliday, 20 February 1997

Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power 
by David Marr.
California, 602 pp., $50, October 1995, 0 520 07833 0
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... star had subsequently waned, not least as a result of persecution by both French and Japanese. In May 1941, they established the Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh, as a front for activity in the new wartime context, yet a year before the August 1945 uprising they were still a small, persecuted group, ‘a minor irritant to the French authorities, and ...

Morituri

D.A.N. Jones, 23 May 1985

Secret Villages 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 0 571 13443 2
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Miss Peabody’s Inheritance 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 157 pp., £7.95, April 1985, 0 670 47952 7
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Mr Scobie’s Riddle 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Penguin, 226 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 14 007490 2
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The Modern Common Wind 
by Don Bloch.
Heinemann, 234 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 0 434 07551 5
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Fiskadoro 
by Denis Johnson.
Chatto, 221 pp., £9.50, May 1985, 0 7011 2935 2
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... people. For Punch readers it is assumed that Scotland is already pretty familiar, and the stories may have a punch-line. The Encounter stories are more allusive, elliptical, up-market. The first two stories concern illegitimate bairns. One is called ‘South America’: a Scottish engineer goes to that continent, leaving his wife with two children, and seems ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... It is admittedly a small one, but a damaging point for MacCabe’s argument about Eliot and Joyce may seem to ensue from it. In Dubliners, Joyce would never have permitted himself a fuzziness about an utterance of the ‘have his say’/‘hev my say’ type. In this sense, his practice is closer than George Eliot’s to that which MacCabe calls ‘classic ...

‘Stravinsky’

Paul Driver, 23 January 1986

Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky 
edited by Robert Craft.
Thames and Hudson, 239 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 500 01368 3
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Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence Vol. III 
edited by Robert Craft.
Faber, 543 pp., £35, October 1985, 0 571 13373 8
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... a coffee-table adornment, successor to Igor and Vera Stravinsky and A Stravinsky Scrapbook – may look attractive, but its layout in wide double columns with extensive footnotes compounds the difficulty of reading. After certain page-turns one is confronted by four spacious blocks of print, packed with possibly inconsequential matter, and one’s eye ...

Ways of being a man

Nicholas Spice, 24 September 1992

The English Patient 
by Michael Ondaatje.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 9780747512547
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... somehow guaranteed the novel’s quality, making Ondaatje into a kind of modern Flaubert. But it may be that Ondaatje has spent too long considering what he has written, listened to himself so often that he has occasionally lost a sense of what he is sounding like. Would Flaubert, at any rate, have written the phrase ‘turn eternal in a prayer’ or ...

Hydra’s Heads

Terence Hawkes, 22 February 1996

The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr 
by R.R. Davies.
Oxford, 401 pp., £20, November 1995, 0 19 820508 2
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The Prince’s Choice: A Personal Selection from Shakespeare 
Hodder, 137 pp., £12.99, November 1995, 0 340 66039 2Show More
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... but a kind of apartheid routinely keeps them distinct. Towns, and the law administered from them, may generate ‘oases of Englishness’, but another Wales of poets, minstrels and prophets ‘apprenticed in ancient lore’ lies well beyond the English ken. Glyn Dŵr’s was a revolt of that Wales: a rising against law, in the name of lore. Fuelled and ...

Promises, Promises

Erin Maglaque: The Love Plot, 21 April 2022

Love: A History in Five Fantasies 
by Barbara Rosenwein.
Polity, 220 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 1 5095 3183 7
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... its realities. ‘To be in fantasy is to live “as if”,’ according to Denise Riley, but life may become intolerable when a metaphor collides with the facts.So love has a history. Does knowing that make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history may also be – is – a kind ...

Under the Arrow Storm

Tom Shippey: The Battle of Crécy, 8 September 2022

Crécy: Battle of Five Kings 
by Michael Livingston.
Osprey, 303 pp., £20, June, 978 1 4728 4705 8
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... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the ...

After Mubarak

Adam Shatz, 17 February 2011

... it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all ...

Diary

Neal Ascherson: Among the icebergs, 18 October 2007

... as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge. The Ilulissat ice fjord leads back to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a ...

Uncleanness

Robert Alter: Reading Leviticus anthropologically, 3 March 2005

Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation 
by Mary Douglas.
Oxford, 211 pp., £45, November 2004, 0 19 926523 2
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... unnostalgic approach of these texts to the Israelite people and to many of its leaders, including David, the founder of the national dynasty. It is unfortunate that Douglas should have chosen to engage in the same conjectural enterprise as such interpreters, for she is certainly more interesting intellectually than they are. In her discussion of the scapegoat ...

Meaningless Legs

Frank Kermode: John Gielgud, 21 June 2001

Gielgud: A Theatrical Life 1904-2000 
by Jonathan Croall.
Methuen, 579 pp., £20, November 2000, 0 413 74560 0
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John G.: The Authorised Biography of John Gielgud 
by Sheridan Morley.
Hodder, 510 pp., £20, May 2001, 0 340 36803 9
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John Gielgud: An Actor’s Life 
by Gyles Brandreth.
Sutton, 196 pp., £6.99, April 2001, 0 7509 2752 6
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... in 1939, when Auden and Isherwood and Pears and Britten fled to America to escape it. This claim may not be quite groundless but it probably underestimates the complexity of the emigrants’ motives. And perhaps, as Morley believes, the police and the judiciary had been gradually getting tougher on homosexuals ever since the persecution of Wilde in ...