Off Narragansett

Karl Miller, 28 September 1989

Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn 
by Paul Watkins.
Century Hutchinson, 269 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 09 173914 4
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Blood and Water 
by Patrick McGrath.
Penguin Originals, 183 pp., £4.99, February 1989, 0 14 011005 4
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The Grotesque 
by Patrick McGrath.
Viking, 186 pp., £11.95, October 1989, 0 670 82987 0
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... alleged misrepresentation, and the sources of that misery, a misery James has yet to experience, may include the thought that not all fishing voyages are wholesome. Patrick McGrath’s first book, which has only just managed to precede his second in British bookshops, has 13 ornate horror stories. Hands sprout from heads, pith-helmets are thereby ...

Diary

William Rodgers: Party Conference Jamboree, 25 October 1990

... the fragility of its confidence, however. Mrs Thatcher had shot its fox, improbable fox though it may be. Neil Kinnock was harshly reminded that every government has formidable cards to play in the run-up to a general election. On the eve of Blackpool, an NOP survey for the Independent and BBC 2’s Newsnight showed that, despite the downturn in the ...

Diamond Daggers

Stephen Wall, 28 June 1990

Death’s Darkest Face 
by Julian Symons.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £12.95, May 1990, 0 333 51783 0
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Vendetta 
by Michael Dibdin.
Faber, 281 pp., £12.99, June 1990, 0 571 14332 6
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Gallowglass 
by Barbara Vine.
Viking, 296 pp., £13.99, March 1990, 0 670 83241 3
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... taken up by a middle-aged actor belatedly trying to discover what crime or crimes his father may have committed long ago. Geoffrey Elder is introduced as a former friend, now deceased, by Julian Symons himself, who purports merely to have edited the thespian’s posthumous ms. Symons admits to shaping and sharpening the presentation of Elder’s ...

Pretenders

Kenneth Fowler, 13 June 1991

Ways of Lying: Dissimulation and Conformity in Early Modern Europe 
by Perez Zagorin.
Harvard, 337 pp., £27.95, September 1990, 0 674 94834 3
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Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in 16th-Century Spain 
by Richard Kagan.
California, 229 pp., £24.95, July 1990, 0 520 06655 3
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‘In his Image and Likeness’: Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regenshurg, 1500-1600 
by Kristin Zapalac.
Cornell, 280 pp., $29.95, October 1990, 0 8014 2269 8
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... and had reverberations on the Continent because of hostility there towards the Jesuits. Zagorin may go too far in attributing dissimulation to some of the occultists, libertines and unbelievers whom he sees hiding behind esotericism (Sir Walter Raleigh is a case in point), but his central thesis of the pervasiveness of dissimulation in 16th and 17th-century ...

Fault-Finders

Michael Dobson, 18 November 1993

‘Hamlet’ versus ‘Lear’: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art 
by R.A. Foakes.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £30, March 1993, 0 521 34292 9
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Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels 
by Brian Vickers.
Yale, 508 pp., £35, April 1993, 0 300 05415 7
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Shakespeare, Poet and Citizen 
by Victor Kieran.
Verso, 261 pp., £18.95, March 1993, 0 86091 392 9
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... have been perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply ...

Insiderish

Colm Tóibín, 26 May 1994

Profane Friendship 
by Harold Brodkey.
Cape, 387 pp., £15.99, April 1994, 0 224 03775 7
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... that can occur in coupling, and how the mind registers the light and shade of intimacy, but we may laugh when we come across this: So she loved my butt – and the nape of my neck ... And my lips somewhat, the not-hurtful things. I’m big enough phallically that some people do what she did and widen helplessly. Maybe that is really common. Really, she ...

Just Sceaux Stories

Angelica Goodden, 23 February 1995

Madame du Deffand and Her World 
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh.
Halban, 481 pp., £20, November 1994, 1 870015 51 7
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Lettres à Voltaire 
by Madame du Deffand, edited by Chantal Thomas.
Rivages, 215 pp., frs 55, October 1994, 2 86930 839 6
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... what Madame du Deffand was not. She was not, whatever the publisher of Benedetta Craveri’s book may claim, a woman who ‘approached love and sex with a frankness centuries ahead of her time’: her time was the 18th-century Regency, which took a casual view of fidelity, and the hedonistic age of Louis XV. She died in the reign of Louis XVI, a couple of ...

A Salvo for Malawi

Douglas Oliver, 23 June 1994

... that present moment.He’s still alive as he turnsjust a second before the shooting;and so I may tell you his story,not tapping into memory but into time,and refire the first salvo for the endof white hegemony in Central Africa.You must come along. Whether you’re aCaribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,or white middle class in Surrey,or an elderly ...

Who is worse?

Edward Said, 20 October 1994

... the dawning of a new age of peace and prosperity. By the time of the Cairo Agreement on 4 May, Rabin’s victory was complete. On 12 May Meron Benvenisti said of the Cairo Agreement in Haaretz: ‘A perusal of hundreds of the Agreement’s pages can leave no doubt about who is the winner and the loser in this ...

Buying and Selling

Paul Foot, 6 April 1995

The Davies Report: The ‘Great Battle’ in Swansea 
by Michael Davies.
Thoemmes, 139 pp., £3.99, October 1994, 1 85506 366 2
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... As an ultimate philosophical proposition, the case for voluntary euthanasia is strong. Whatever may be said for and against suicide generally, the appeal of death is immeasurably greater when it is sought not for a poor reason or just any reason, but for good cause so to speak; when it is invoked not on behalf of a socially useful person, but on behalf ...

Diary

Jane Miller: On the National Curriculum, 15 October 1987

... services like cleaning is paying off handsomely. Many a ‘right-thinking’ newspaper columnist may now write comfortably of those low standards to explain why her children are at independent schools and the family buoyant on its BUPA insurance. Those of us who work with teachers and children and go into schools have been astonishingly foolish. We thought ...

Rendings

Edward Timms, 19 April 1990

Thomas Mann and his Family 
by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Collins, 230 pp., £20, August 1989, 9780002158374
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... a translator working for the Jewish Council of the Warsaw Ghetto. His fluent command of German may have helped him to survive the Nazi occupation. He joined a resistance organisation, escaped from the Ghetto, and spent the last years of the war in hiding with his wife. Their lives were saved first by a Pole who gave them shelter, later by the advancing Red ...

Getting together

Heribert Adam, 14 June 1990

... Mandela is, in fact, manufacturing a new myth: that the past no longer matters. But it does. It may be forgiven, but it can’t be forgotten. By legitimating the perpetrators of past apartheid crimes in the interests of future peace, conversion without repentance is condoned. Not without reason does the religious practice of cleansing from past sins insist ...

I could have fancied her

Angela Carter, 16 February 1989

Beauty in History: Society, Politics and Personal Appearance c. 1500 to the Present 
by Arthur Marwick.
Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., £18.95, September 1988, 0 500 25101 0
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... feel the same way about going to bed with handsome men, although a dishy premature ejaculator may find that women shun him. He certainly has a low opinion of the feminist sexual imagination. He applauds the way women abandoned brassières in the late Sixties, and believes that for some of the women who did so it was ‘part of the realisation that ...

Viva Biba

Janet Watts, 8 December 1988

Very Heaven: Looking back at the 1960s 
edited by Sara Maitland.
Virago, 227 pp., £4.95, October 1988, 0 86068 958 1
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... movies as if he were some sort of touchstone.’ In another child of the Sixties, this sentiment may strike a chord. For the rest, it will probably epitomise what they don’t understand, cannot share, and must therefore dismiss as rubbish. The voices in this book would provide some good lines for a fringe theatre show about a bunch of women rapping (as it ...