Plus or Minus One Ear

Steven Shapin: Weights and Measures, 30 August 2012

World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement 
by Robert Crease.
Norton, 317 pp., £18.99, October 2011, 978 0 393 07298 3
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... due measure, just measure. Double standards were no standards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice on top of the Old Bailey express both unbiased scales and an unbiased weigher. (This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded because she is taken to personify fairness.) God kept weights and measures in his bag, but in human society the objects ...

Give us a break

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Gissing’s Life, 9 July 2009

George Gissing: A Life 
by Paul Delany.
Phoenix, 444 pp., £14.99, February 2009, 978 0 7538 2573 0
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... appeal for him. They had neither the coarse sexuality of a work-girl nor the glamour of a society lady. Another hindrance was his difficulty in seeing any woman as his equal; or, more precisely, if he had an equal relation – with Clara Collet, for example – it seemed to exclude a romantic attachment. This kind of analysis is characteristic of Delany’s ...

On Thatcher

Karl Miller, 25 April 2013

... at her departure. Chalked up on a wall in Derry is the possibly ambivalent ‘Iron Lady, rust in peace.’ This paper was born at the time, 1979, when she became prime minister, having won her election as Tory leader, a post she’d gained over the dead bodies of many of the party’s wise heads. It did not take very long to see that papers of ...

Better than Ganymede

Tom Paulin: Larkin, 21 October 2010

Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica 
edited by Anthony Thwaite.
Faber, 475 pp., £22.50, October 2010, 978 0 571 23909 2
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... has much to recommend it: I spend my days footling in a job I care nothing about, a curate among lady-clerks; I evade all responsibility, familial, professional, emotional, social, not even saving much money or helping my mother. I look around me & I see people getting on, or doing things, or bringing up children – and here I am in a kind of vacuum ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Selling Up, 11 February 2010

... or even a car; and I don’t have a job (belletrist). If a sensible, attractive, middle-aged lady came across me on a dating website she would immediately think to herself: feckless, disturbed. Also, loser. The panic about clearing out the house wasn’t the only thing keeping me up. I had a dread of losing the place; a very real, primal dread in the pit ...

I have no books to consult

Stephen Sedley: Lord Mansfield, 22 January 2015

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason 
by Norman Poser.
McGill-Queen’s, 532 pp., £24.99, September 2013, 978 0 7735 4183 2
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... an early age to live with the childless Mansfields at Kenwood as a companion to their great-niece Lady Elizabeth Murray, who had lived with them since the death of her mother. Zoffany’s double portrait now hanging in Scone Palace, painted circa 1780 when Dido was in her late teens, shows two elegant young women with different skin colours but similar ...

Half-Finished People

Thomas Meaney: Germany Imagines Hellas, 11 October 2012

The Tyranny of Greece over Germany 
by E.M. Butler.
Cambridge, 351 pp., £23.99, March 2012, 978 1 107 69764 5
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... broke down altogether when I entered the lofty gallery where the blessed goddess of beauty, Our Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. I lay prostrate at her feet for a long time, and I wept so bitterly that it would have melted a heart of stone. And indeed the goddess did look down pitifully upon me, yet at the same time so hopelessly as if she were trying ...

Little Emperors

Yun Sheng: Memoir of an Only Child, 19 May 2016

One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment 
by Mei Fong.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, January 2016, 978 1 78074 845 0
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China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy 
by Kay Ann Johnson.
Chicago, 218 pp., £16, March 2016, 978 0 226 35251 0
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... in many fields. Educated Chinese women often qualify for the obnoxious category ‘leftover lady’: career women whose opportunity to marry has passed. There is still a tendency to condescend to single women and see them as failures, but many brilliant ‘leftover’ women are glad to see that their parents are slowly learning to respect their ...

Marvellous Money

Michael Wood: Eça de Queirós, 3 January 2008

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life 
by José Maria Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Dedalus, 714 pp., £15, March 2007, 978 1 903517 53 6
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... stiff and virginal, stood two almost empty bottles of brandy and gin. Carlos finished off the lady’s gin, and her hard bed was left as turbulent and disorderly as a battlefield. Each is more literal than the other at times. Pinheiro and Stevens keep the mountain (‘montão’) of bibles, and lose the nest (‘ninho’) of the same; generally stick ...

Good for Nothing

James Morone: America’s ‘base cupidity’, 19 May 2005

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America 
by Scott Sandage.
Harvard, 362 pp., £22.95, February 2005, 9780674015104
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... Tappan declared, as he and his followers stomped out of the annual meeting, ‘for a lady to sit behind closed doors with gentlemen’). Tappan lived the wild life of a 19th-century evangelical businessman: he went broke in 1827, saw anti-abolitionist mobs sack his store and burn his mansion in 1834, and failed again in 1837 (losing a million ...

Why Sakhalin?

Joseph Frank: Charting Chekhov’s career, 17 February 2005

Chekhov: Scenes from a Life 
by Rosamund Bartlett.
Free Press, 395 pp., £20, July 2004, 0 7432 3074 4
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Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters 
translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips.
Penguin, 552 pp., £12.99, June 2004, 0 14 044922 1
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... the winter in Yalta, which provides the background for one of his most famous stories, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. In a Russian-Jewish bookstore owned by Isaac Sinani, a member of the Karaite sect (the Karaites refuse the rabbinical tradition), he met Maxim Gorky, whose early stories he admired, and Ivan Bunin, with whom he became quite intimate ...

At the Video Store

Daniel Soar: Saramago, 2 December 2004

The Double 
by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 292 pp., £15.99, August 2004, 1 84343 099 1
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... pages later we learn that she hasn’t. She is Maria da Paz, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s current lady friend; he has been avoiding her and thinking of ending the relationship. This wasn’t what we expected. Not only does he have a girlfriend: he’s even cruel to her. This contradictoriness, the cruelty disguised by the meek exterior, has made him a ...

Just one of those ends

Michael Wood: Apocalypse Regained, 13 December 2001

Apocalypse Now Redux 
directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
August 2001
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Marlon Brando 
by Patricia Bosworth.
Weidenfeld, 216 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 297 84284 6
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... We don’t see this quality emerge unmistakably until he appears dressed as a gun-toting old lady with a funny Southern accent in The Missouri Breaks (1976), but the hint of androgyny was surely always there. This is some distance from Bosworth’s claim that the young Brando ‘presented the ordinary American guy to the public’. Unless of course the ...

Diary

David Craig: Barra Microcosm, 24 May 2001

... presumably funded by the Board of Agriculture, which bought Vatersay from the absentee owner, Lady Gordon Cathcart. Among the gaunt masonry, brown and black and ruddy cattle are grazing with their calves, on smooth sward that makes everything seem spaced out and unnaturally distinct, the cattle a blood-link to the people of Vatersay, the houses memorials ...

Diary

Murray Sayle: The Makiko and Junichiro Show, 17 October 2002

... account. Then, in the most surprising plot twist so far, Koizumi called on his one-time leading lady Makiko Tanaka to rebut, with documentary evidence, a charge by two weekly magazines that she had diverted to her own account the state-paid salaries of an unspecified number of secretaries who were employed by her family-owned bus firm. Considering the vast ...