Rhythm Method

Jenny Diski, 22 September 1994

R.D. Laing: A Biography 
by Adrian Laing.
Peter Owen, 248 pp., £25, August 1994, 0 7206 0934 8
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... would be fair. Perhaps none of that is our business. There are no end of families badly treated by self-obsessed individuals who have made great and lasting contributions to the wider world. The personal failures ought not to detract from an assessment of the work. But there is a question to be asked of a purveyor of wisdom who displays none in his dealings ...

Infatuated Worlds

Jerome McGann, 22 September 1994

Thomas Chatterton: Early Sources and Responses 
Routledge/Thoemmes, £295, July 1993, 0 415 09255 8Show More
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... and madness.’ Flushed with hope, Chatterton launched himself with funds of inexperience and self-illusion. So he writes to his mother at the beginning of May: Good God! how superior is London to that despicable place Bristol! Here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities ... The poverty of authors is a common ...

No Gentleman

Jonathan Parry, 23 June 1994

Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics 
by Peter Marsh.
Yale, 725 pp., £30, May 1994, 0 300 05801 2
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... that the obstacle to implementing his social politics was the Liberal peerage: in fact, it was the self-satisfied middle classes, who had long had more power over the content of Liberalism than Chamberlain recognised, and who quickly became alarmed by his rhetoric and activity. At the Board of Trade, he antagonised laissez-faire shipowners and railway ...
Daring to Excel: The Story of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain 
by Ruth Railton.
Secker, 466 pp., £20, August 1992, 0 436 23359 2
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... social confidence ... It was hard to believe she would run away at such a critical time, and that self-esteem was more important than the future of the NYO.’ Not another word about Ivey Dickson, no hint that she was to change her mind and remain Musical Director for the next 18 years. The NYO I joined in 1968 was nominally Ivey Dickson’s, but judging by ...

The Redeemed Vicarage

John Lennard, 12 May 1994

Pictures of Perfection 
by Reginald Hill.
HarperCollins, 303 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 00 232392 3
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... the pleasures of the senses.’) He is also used throughout the book as a sounding-board for the self-conscious and idealistic aspirations which characterise the ivory towers of education as much as the classically isolated loci of detection. Subsequent novels experimented with quotations, both embedded and epigraphic, from Pope, Keats, Marcus Aurelius and ...

Culture and Personality

Caroline Humphrey, 31 August 1989

Margaret Mead: A Life of Controversy 
by Phyllis Grosskurth.
Penguin, 96 pp., £3.99, May 1989, 0 14 008760 5
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Ruth Benedict: Stranger in the Land 
by Margaret Caffrey.
Texas, 432 pp., $24.95, February 1989, 0 292 74655 5
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... Mead’ is coming to represent: the blunderer into tribal life, dupe of the primitives, the self-dramatiser, spinner of graceless and unlikely theories. Another version of the anthropologist is the philosopher of culture and society in all its variations, one who understands humanity in some broad, if rather intuitive and dreamy way: Ruth ...

Tocqueville in Saginaw

Alan Ryan, 2 March 1989

Tocqueville: A Biography 
by André Jardin, translated by Lydia Davis and Robert Hemenway.
Peter Halban, 550 pp., £18, October 1988, 1 870015 13 4
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... countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose instincts were ...

The World of School

John Bayley, 28 September 1989

The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 523 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 297 79320 9
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Osbert: A Portrait of Osbert Lancaster 
by Richard Boston.
Collins, 256 pp., £17.50, August 1989, 0 00 216324 1
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Ackerley: A Life of J.R. Ackerley 
by Peter Parker.
Constable, 465 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 09 469000 6
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... of disciples in the Lower Fourth, the really superior person, not saint, not sage, but outcast, self-abandoned. Waugh had the same school-world dreams in social form, and they continue to exercise a fascination – crude, perhaps, but potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at ...

Effervescence

Alan Ryan, 9 November 1989

Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event 
by Steven Blakemore.
University Press of New England, 115 pp., £10, April 1989, 0 87451 452 5
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The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness 
edited by H.T. Mason and William Doyle.
Sutton, 205 pp., £17.95, June 1989, 0 86299 483 7
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The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England 1789-1832 
by Seamus Deane.
Harvard, 212 pp., £19.95, November 1988, 0 674 32240 1
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... Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch appropriate to their commitment. Burke, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, as much as Brissot, Danton and Robespierre, tried to seize the stylistic initiative as much as the political initiative, or more accurately as ...

Sister Ape

Caroline Humphrey, 19 April 1990

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science 
by Londa Schiebinger.
Harvard, 355 pp., £23.50, November 1989, 0 674 57623 3
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Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science 
by Donna Haraway.
Routledge, 486 pp., £40, January 1990, 0 415 90114 6
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... it be done handsomely, they would turn them all from Females into Males; so great is grown the self-conceit of the Masculine, and the disregard of the Female Sex.’ Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Newton all rejected allegory and the personification of the mind or the soul. In science the ‘feminine’ was excised from the imagined process of ...

Institutions

Alan Ryan, 26 November 1987

Ruling Performance: British Governments from Attlee to Thatcher 
edited by Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon.
Blackwell, 344 pp., £25, October 1987, 0 631 15645 3
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The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions 
edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
Blackwell, 667 pp., £45, September 1987, 0 631 13841 2
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Judges 
by David Pannick.
Oxford, 255 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 0 19 215956 9
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... class oppression for overt war, while announcing the imminent arrival of the freedom, justice and self-fulfilment preached by the idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one ...

Like the trees on Primrose Hill

Samuel Hynes, 2 March 1989

Louis MacNeice: A Study 
by Edna Longley.
Faber, 178 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 13748 2
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Louis MacNeice: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 160 pp., £4.95, August 1988, 0 571 15270 8
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A Scatter of Memories 
by Margaret Gardiner.
Free Association, 280 pp., £15.95, November 1988, 1 85343 043 9
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... know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role for himself, the Poet as Ordinary Bloke. The particulars in the Zoo passage sound ordinary enough, but the telling of them is highly poetical, from the allusion to Hopkins’s sonnet at the beginning to the swirl of ...

Pow-Wow

Mary Beard, 26 October 1989

After Thatcher 
by Paul Hirst.
Collins, 254 pp., £7.99, September 1989, 0 00 215169 3
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Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On 
Verso, 172 pp., £22.95, August 1989, 0 86091 232 9Show More
Essays on Politics and Literature 
by Bernard Crick.
Edinburgh, 259 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 85224 621 8
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... the left apparently come round to these Liberal causes? The cynic would, no doubt, allege blatant self-interest. Losing any hope that Labour can possibly win the next election on our existing electoral system, the Left have now come to see that PR is their only way of returning a Labour government to power. This cynical view would also explain the glaring ...

Greeromania

Sylvia Lawson, 20 April 1989

Daddy, we hardly knew you 
by Germaine Greer.
Hamish Hamilton, 312 pp., £13.95, March 1989, 0 241 12538 3
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... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...

Furibundo de la Serna

Laurence Whitehead, 2 November 1995

The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America 
by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright.
Verso, 155 pp., £19.95, June 1995, 1 85984 942 3
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Che Guevara 
by Jean Cormier, with Hilda Guevara and Alberto Grando.
Editions du Rocher, 448 pp., frs 139, August 1995, 2 268 01967 5
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Journal de Bolivie 
by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, translated by Fanchita Gonzalez- Batlle and France Binard.
La Découverte, 256 pp., frs 120, August 1995, 2 7071 2482 6
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L’Année ou nous n’étions nulle part: Extraits du journal de Che Guevara en Afrique 
edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo, Froilán Escóbar and Félix Guerra, translated by Mara Hernandez and René Solis.
Métaillié, 281 pp., frs 120, September 1995, 2 86424 205 2
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... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...