Naming of Dogs

Edmund Leach, 20 March 1986

The View from Afar 
byClaude Lévi-Strauss, translated byJoachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss.
Blackwell, 311 pp., £19.50, June 1985, 0 631 13966 4
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... Is that adequate? I suspect not. The French version carried on front and back two pictures by the 43-year-old German artist Anita Albus about whom Lévi-Strauss writes enthusiastically in Chapter 20. The text refers directly to both pictures. The present English edition has a cover picture by Max Ernst, who is the ...

Britain’s Juntas

Arthur Gavshon, 19 September 1985

The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War 
byJohn Simpson and Jana Bennett.
Robson, 416 pp., £12.95, June 1985, 0 86051 292 4
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... cities and villages during the Dirty War in search of anyone answering to the definition offered by General Jorge Rafael Videla: ‘A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilisation.’ The dictatorial regimes led successively ...

State-Sponsored Counter-Terror

Karl Miller, 8 May 1986

Parliamentary Debates: Hansard, Vol. 95, No 94 
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... Minister’s decision – with the minimum of Cabinet consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain. The best of the debate justified Mr Healey’s words of praise, and those of other participants. A high standard of argument was achieved, there was far less of the usual bombast, posturing and silly ...

Matters of Taste

Peter Graham, 4 December 1986

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen 
byHarold McGee.
Allen and Unwin, 684 pp., £20, September 1986, 9780043060032
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The French Menu Cookbook 
byRichard Olney.
Dorling Kindersley, 294 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 86318 181 3
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Out to Lunch 
byPaul Levy.
Chatto, 240 pp., £10.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3091 1
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The Good Food Guide 1987 
edited byDrew Smith.
Consumers’ Association/Hodder, 725 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 340 39600 8
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... on consumer feedback), the most reliable guide to British restaurants, has an interesting article by two scientists on their work with trained ‘taste panels’. It seems that some people are physiologically more sensitive to some chemicals than others and therefore perceive them differently: ‘a matter of taste’ is a figure of speech which would appear ...

Seeing double

Patrick Hughes, 7 May 1987

The Arcimboldo Effect 
byPontus Hulten.
Thames and Hudson, 402 pp., £32, May 1987, 0 500 27471 1
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... May. This is the book of the exhibition. Modern interest in Arcimboldo dates from his inclusion, by means of enlarged photographs, in the exhibition ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’, organised by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936. Margaret Barr remembers: Alfred and I were in Paris in ...

Sangvinolence

J.A. Burrow, 21 May 1987

The Mirour of Mans Salvacioune: A Middle English Translation of ‘Speculum Humanae Salvationis’ 
edited byAvril Henry.
Scolar, 347 pp., £35, March 1987, 0 85967 716 8
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... perhaps because readers no longer expect books simply to ‘reflect’ reality. Another reason may be that mirrors themselves are no longer convex, as they usually were until the 17th century, so that the word has ceased to carry the attractive promise of a larger reality compressed into a small and manageable compass. One of the most widely read of all ...

Topographer Royal

William Vaughan, 1 May 1980

The Diary of Joseph Farington RA: Vols V and VI (1 August 1801-31 December 1804) 
edited byKenneth Garlick.
Yale (for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), 447 pp., £15, October 1979, 0 300 02418 5
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... span); at the present rate of production – two volumes per half year – the full text should be available by the end of 1981. The editors have decided, partly because of financial considerations, not to append notes or an index to the individual volumes. This contrasts with Grieg’s version, where the racy and ...

Gay’s the word

Hugo Williams, 6 November 1980

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America 
byEdmund White.
Deutsch, 336 pp., £5.95, August 1980, 9780233973012
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... to enter occupations – telephone or television repairs, Pacific Gas – which they consider to be ‘hot’ sexually? ‘We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolical conveniences,’ said Isherwood in A Single Man. ‘The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into ...

Donne’s Reputation

Sarah Wintle, 20 November 1980

English Renaissance Studies 
edited byJohn Carey.
Oxford, 320 pp., £15, March 1980, 0 19 812093 1
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... studies, and it hovers over much of this book. Five of the essays, including a splendid piece by Barbara Everett on epic catalogues, are on Milton. Eliot made a major contribution to the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, but Milton studies never even faltered. Indeed, important books like Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style were conceived of as counterblasts to ...

Existence Unperceived

W.D. Hart, 15 October 1981

Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.F. Strawson 
edited byZak van Straaten.
Oxford, 302 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 9780198246039
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... Professor Sir Peter Strawson is properly honoured by the 12 essays written for this anthology. Unlike the papers in some other collections of this kind, most of these are addressed to issues in which Strawson has a serious interest and on which he has done substantial work. It is therefore delightful to find that Philosophical Subjects also contains Strawson’s replies to each of the essays presented to him ...

Structuralism Domesticated

Frank Kermode, 20 August 1981

Working with Structuralism 
byDavid Lodge.
Routledge, 207 pp., £10.95, June 1981, 0 7100 0658 6
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... This is a collection of essays by one of our best literary critics, in fact exactly the kind of thing one would expect from him; it simply continues the good work in the manner of his last two books. Why, then, do the reviewers shy like frightened cab-horses? Because Professor Lodge not only includes about seventy-five pages of ‘structuralism’, but actually uses the word in his title, and suggests that it is possible for an English professor to get along with it ...

Second World War-Game

Douglas Johnson, 22 May 1980

1943: The victory that never was 
byJohn Grigg.
Eyre Methuen, 255 pp., £7.95, April 1980, 9780413396105
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... War is concerned, we have for long been accustomed to seeing the frailties of the leaders exposed by zealous commentators. Montgomery was too cautious to be able to exploit victory; Churchill was like a schoolboy in his enthusiasm for wild and ill-considered schemes (as when, discovering ...

Tomboy Grudge

Claire Harman, 27 February 1992

Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life 
byJane Emery.
Murray, 381 pp., £25, June 1991, 0 7195 4768 7
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... of establishment blue-stocking. Her best books have been called novels of ideas, but could perhaps be more accurately described as diversions, for the ideas in them are seldom allowed to settle: the genteel humour which guaranteed her popularity in her own day and relative obscurity in ours diverts the novels away from anything too conclusive. Rose Macaulay ...

Diary

Conor Gearty: Reasons for Loathing Michael Howard, 31 October 1996

... tenure at the Home Office has coincided both with the growing sloppiness of a Whitehall exhausted by perpetual Tory rule and with the emergence for the first time of a muscular, interventionist judiciary. In such circumstances, whoever was in charge of the Government’s determined effort to wreck the lives of our prisoners, our aspiring immigrants and our ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: In Washington, 20 August 1992

... of the ghastly neo-brutalist Madison Square Garden. Mr Hattersley is far too corporeal to be called a ghost, and most delegates wouldn’t have known him from Banquo anyway, but his apparition would, if he were better known, have caused said delegates to put on their garlic. The very last thing that the Democrats need is a reminder of what can happen ...