Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By contrast their antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less well. This side of the Stephen Lawrence case and ...

New Mortality

Iain McGilchrist, 7 June 1984

The AIDS Epidemic 
edited by Kevin Cahill.
Hutchinson, 175 pp., £3.95, January 1984, 0 09 154921 3
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AIDS: Your Questions Answered 
by Richard Fisher.
Gay Men’s Press, 126 pp., £1.95, April 1984, 0 907040 29 2
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Fighting for Our Lives 
by Kit Mouat.
Heretic Books, 160 pp., £2.50, April 1984, 0 946097 14 3
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... The result of the superinfections, even if they can be controlled with drugs, is to compound a weight loss which is severely weakening; one doctor describes the patient with AIDS as looking like a prisoner in a concentration camp. This feebleness in turn exposes him to quiescent infections acquired outside the hospital, to infections from his indigenous ...

Made for TV

Jenny Diski, 14 December 1995

Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter 
by W. Stephen Gilbert.
Hodder, 382 pp., £18.99, November 1995, 0 340 64047 2
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Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen 
by John Cook.
Manchester, 368 pp., £45, October 1995, 0 7190 4601 7
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... wrapped up in one neat package so intricately knotted that we can pick it up, feel its weight and then chuck it in the back of the drawer where it belongs. We might judge the final episode of Cold Lazarus an appropriate moment to draw a line under self-referential fiction, raise our glasses to Dennis Potter for providing a good deal of entertaining ...

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3
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... not having tried to edit out of his earlier poems views which he later regretted, is carrying the weight of those developing arguments. There are critics who have found anti-semitism in the ‘Burial of the Dead’ section of The Waste Land, and in the phrase ‘sapient sutlers’ in ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, but where a more polemical writer ...

Shandying It

John Mullan: Sterne’s Foibles, 6 June 2002

Laurence Sterne: A Life 
by Ian Campbell Ross.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, March 2001, 0 19 212235 5
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... father and deeply felt sketches of social and financial precariousness. Sterne’s rich Uncle Richard, with whom he had boarded, had given him a sight of privilege without its possession. His uncle’s son, also Richard, befriended his impecunious cousin and helped fund him through his time at Jesus ...

Not for Horrid Profs

Colin Burrow: Kermode’s Shakespeare, 1 June 2000

Shakespeare's Language 
by Frank Kermode.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7139 9378 2
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... of Shakespeare’s career and in different sorts of scene each of these pressures has a different weight, and it takes great critical delicacy – of a kind which has much in common with that of a theatre director or a conductor – to determine exactly how they press against each other. Shakespeare also frequently melted strands of imagery together so that ...

How messy it all is

David Runciman: Who benefits from equality?, 22 October 2009

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better 
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
Allen Lane, 331 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84614 039 6
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... not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’. Why then, given all this – the concise argument, the weight of the evidence, the unmistakable practical purpose of the authors – does the book still feel oddly utopian? Part of the problem, I think, is that the argument is not as straightforward as its authors would like. Despite their obvious sense of ...

The Edges of Life

Jeremy Waldron, 12 May 1994

Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion and Euthanasia 
by Ronald Dworkin.
HarperCollins, 273 pp., £17.50, May 1993, 0 394 58941 6
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... who is living it or to those around him. Dworkin recalls the words of the princes’ murderer in Richard III:                                                We smothered The most replenished sweet work of nature, That from the prime creation e’er she framed. At the same time, we cherish the fact that a life ...

Racist Litter

Randall Kennedy: The Lessons of Reconstruction, 30 July 2020

The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution 
by Eric Foner.
Norton, 288 pp., £18.99, October 2019, 978 0 393 65257 4
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... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0
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... renewal of the traditional city as the 20th century disastrously demonstrated.’ That is a lot of weight for two blocks of luxury flats to carry. Anxious to work out where the rot started, they follow the interwar mansion blocks placed on Prince Albert Road along the northern edge of Regent’s Park – one of their more surprising inclusions – as they ...

The Terrifying Vrooom

Colin Burrow: Empsonising, 15 July 2021

Some Versions of Pastoral 
by William Empson, edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 496 pp., £80, November 2020, 978 0 19 965966 1
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The Structure of Complex Words 
by William Empson, edited by Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 672 pp., £95, November 2020, 978 0 19 871343 2
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... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...

Midwinter

J.B. Trapp, 17 November 1983

Thomas More: History and Providence 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 271 pp., £19.50, September 1982, 0 631 13094 2
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The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More 
by Jasper Ridley.
Constable, 338 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 9780094634701
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English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition 
by John King.
Princeton, 539 pp., £30.70, December 1982, 0 691 06502 0
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Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary, 1483-1983 
edited by Peter Newman Brooks.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.50, July 1983, 0 19 826648 0
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The Complete Works of St Thomas More. Vol. VI: A Dialogue concerning Heresies. Part 1: The Text, Part 2: Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary, Index 
edited by T.M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard Marius.
Yale, 435 pp., £76, November 1981, 0 300 02211 5
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... the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides ...

You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel

Mark Greif: ‘Mad Men’, 23 October 2008

Mad Men: Season One 
Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £29.99, October 2008Show More
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... Draper staring into space, Draper sending his secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy home with an electric weight-loss belt to see what it does (predictably, it’s a vibrator; the proposed slogan is ‘You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel’) – is desultory, and distracts only a little from the soap opera antics of bed-hopping and keeping secrets. It was ...

Veering Wildly

Kirsty Gunn: Jayne Anne Phillips, 31 July 2014

Quiet Dell 
by Jayne Anne Phillips.
Cape, 445 pp., £18.99, April 2014, 978 0 224 09935 6
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... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...

Favourite without Portfolio

Jonathan Meades: Designs for the Third Reich, 4 February 2016

Hitler at Home 
by Despina Stratigakos.
Yale, 373 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 0 300 18381 8
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Speer: Hitler’s Architect 
by Martin Kitchen.
Yale, 442 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 300 19044 1
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... excess. His friend the racial theorist, eugenicist and future ill-fated minister of agriculture Richard Walther Darré wrote Race: The New Nobility of the Blood and the Soil at his estate near Jena. Both belonged to the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ideological left of the NSDAP, in which broad church they were about as distant from ...