Tired of Being Boring

Katharine Weber: Murder at Harvard, 4 February 1999

Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder 
by Melanie Thernstrom.
Virago, 219 pp., £9.99, November 1998, 9781860494963
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... often know, human interaction is too complex for mimicry. Sinedu also taped hours of rambling self-questioning. She mailed long confessional letters to complete strangers, some of which were turned over to Harvard by the recipients; Harvard filed them away. ‘I hadn’t admitted her to my class because the writing she had submitted was ...

Fitz

John Bayley, 4 April 1985

With Friends Possessed: A Life of Edward FitzGerald 
by Robert Bernard Martin.
Faber, 313 pp., £17.50, February 1985, 0 571 13462 9
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... not so much Omar’s original, to which he was introduced by his great friend Cowell, a brilliant self-taught linguist, but Tennyson’s In Memoriam. FitzGerald’s relations with Tennyson were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his ...

Party Man

David Marquand, 1 July 1982

Tony Crosland 
by Susan Crosland.
Cape, 448 pp., £10.95, June 1982, 9780224017879
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... well, he was sure of himself. If the author of The Future of Socialism did not have a right to self-assurance, who did? Very well, he was rude. That was a sign of a fundamental seriousness and egalitarianism. By the mid-Sixties, when I got into Parliament, I had become an admirer. Gaitskell was dead, and the revisionists needed a champion. George Brown was ...

Faculty at War

Tom Paulin, 17 June 1982

Re-Reading English 
edited by Peter Widdowson.
Methuen, 246 pp., £7.95, March 1982, 0 416 31150 4
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Against Criticism 
by Iain McGilchrist.
Faber, 271 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 571 11922 0
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... in transforming ‘life’ into a critical term, a touchstone of aesthetic value. He adopted a self-consciously awkward prose style and it may be due to his influence that good critical prose is now dismissed as ‘bellelettrism’ (see, for example, Stephen Trombley’s dismally representative approach in his study of Virginia Woolf). For many years, the ...

Sexual Subjects

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 21 October 1982

The Sexual Fix 
by Stephen Heath.
Macmillan, 191 pp., £12.95, June 1982, 0 333 32750 0
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Questions of Cinema 
by Stephen Heath.
Macmillan, 257 pp., £12.50, August 1981, 0 333 26122 4
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‘Sight and Sound’: A 50th-Anniversary Selection 
edited by David Wilson.
Faber, 327 pp., £12.50, September 1982, 0 571 11943 3
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... the fact that God says yes to sexuality, and so abandon ourselves to Total Loving and shuddering self-realisation in the ‘Big O’, we are in fact being taken for a ride, and riding each other, in talk. To start with, somewhere in the 18th century, this talk was straightforwardly scientific. The sexual was defined and cognitively confined into a specialism ...

Hand and Mind

Michael Baxandall, 17 March 1983

Dürer: His Art and Life 
by Fedja Anzelewsky, translated by Heide Grieve.
Gordon Fraser, 273 pp., £50, November 1982, 0 86092 068 2
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Dürer: Paintings, Prints, Drawings 
by Peter Strieder, translated by Nancy Gordon and Walter Strauss.
Muller, 400 pp., £35, September 1982, 0 584 95038 1
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... open but real German, moving between Nuremberg and Europe. A third is the Dürer of the exhaustive self-documentation, letters, diaries, books and odd notes, as well as stunning self-portraits at most ages. But there is also something mythic about the man, in that he seems to play a Shakespeareanly fraught role, a role ...

Britishmen

Tom Paulin, 5 November 1981

Too Long a Sacrifice: Life and Death in Northern Ireland since 1969 
by Jack Holland.
Columbus, 217 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 396 07934 2
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A History of Northern Ireland 
by Patrick Buckland.
Gill and Macmillan, 195 pp., £3.95, April 1981, 0 7171 1069 9
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... what d’ya mean? We’re not Irish – we’re British.’ They laughed at each other, but rather self-consciously. It was obvious they were discomfited, unsettled, and they flung themselves with increased vigour into another round of furious and distracting activity. This fascinating story follows a subtle and intelligent discussion of Loyalist ...
Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760-1815 
by Ian Christie.
Arnold, 359 pp., £17.50, June 1982, 0 7131 6157 4
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Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680-1730 
by Geoffrey Holmes.
Allen and Unwin, 323 pp., £18.50, November 1982, 0 04 942178 6
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... of England’ series. Certainly it looks well with the other volumes already on the shelf: less self-referential than the work of Elton and Gash, broader in scope than Speck, more cogent than J.R. Jones, the book consummates a lifetime’s labour in the field of late Georgian British history. Christie’s approach is of a piece with the series as a ...

Blake at work

David Bindman, 2 April 1981

William Blake, printmaker 
by Robert Essick.
Princeton, 304 pp., £27.50, August 1980, 0 691 03954 2
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... his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative mother of the Messiah. None of this affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best masters of his ...

Futures

John Dunn, 5 February 1981

History of the Idea of Progress 
by Robert Nisbet.
Heinemann, 370 pp., £8.50, November 1980, 0 435 82657 3
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... progress is unlikely in principle to be both a clear and an uncontentious category of social self-understanding. Since it is such a global category and since what it aims to render more intelligible is the situation of societies in time, its significance is also always as much a matter of sentiment as it is simply one of causal understanding. To write ...

Dialectical Satire

Paul Edwards, 18 September 1986

The Madhouse 
by Alexander Zinoviev, translated by Michael Kirkwood.
Gollancz, 411 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780575037304
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Judith 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 298 pp., £11.95, August 1986, 0 436 28853 2
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Missing Persons 
by David Cook.
Alison Press/Secker, 184 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 436 10675 2
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Only by Mistake 
by P.J. Kavanagh.
Calder, 158 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 7145 4084 6
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... consciousness or deliberation. Man can only re-attain this grace by completing his knowledge of self and world, thus returning to Eden by the back door. Judith, Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel, takes Kleist’s essay, with its switchback logic that equates god with puppet, as one of its main sources of meaning. Part of the book is set in an ashram in India ...

Solomon Tuesday

Rosemary Ashton, 8 January 1987

R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian 
by Malcolm Woodfield.
Oxford, 227 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 19 818564 2
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... works of Tennyson, Arnold and George Eliot as they came out. And his concern was unashamedly, even self-consciously to see everything in the context of the age. Thus, though claims cannot be made for the universality of his interests, it is by no means ridiculous to urge that those who wish to become thoroughly inward with the best that was thought and said in ...

Hatless to Hindhead

Susannah Clapp, 1 May 1980

A Country Calendar 
by Flora Thompson, edited by Margaret Lane.
Oxford, 307 pp., £6.95, October 1979, 9780192117533
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... new ‘germ-conscious generation’, fleeing from their fathers with the help of bicycles, eagerly self-improving, anxiously attempting to improve others. But stronger than this is Flora Thompson’s own sense of separation from what she is viewing. Her position as post-office assistant is similar to that of the governess in a Victorian novel: sober and ...

Boundary Books

Margaret Meek, 21 February 1980

Kate Crackernuts 
by Katharine Briggs.
Kestrel, 224 pp., £2.95, September 1980, 0 7226 5557 6
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Socialisation through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example 
by Felicity Ann O’Dell.
Cambridge, 278 pp., £14, January 1979, 9780521219686
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Divide and Rule 
by Jan Mark.
Kestrel, 248 pp., £3.50, October 1980, 0 7226 5620 3
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... between fables, exempla, fairy-tales, jocular tales, nouvelles and nursery tales. Intolerant of self-indulgence (she doesn’t believe in fairies) and Peter Pannery, Dr Briggs investigates folklore in Shakespeare as a musicologist would examine folk-song in Vaughan Williams. She is not concerned to tell children stories, but in Abbey Lubbers, Banshees and ...

Freedom

Lyndall Gordon, 18 September 1980

Olive Schreiner: A Biography 
by Ruth First and Ann Scott.
Deutsch, 383 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 233 97152 1
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... never understand her horror of falsity. How does a biographer, accustomed to delve for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself directly, without a mask? First and Scott record the events and emotions of Schreiner’s life with minute fidelity, but the living, brilliant-eyed woman escapes yet another attempt to pin her down. Her openness ...