Toss the monkey wrench

August Kleinzahler: Lee Harwood’s risky poems, 19 May 2005

Collected Poems 
by Lee Harwood.
Shearsman, 522 pp., £17.95, May 2004, 9780907562405
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... from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping ...

Topographer Royal

William Vaughan, 1 May 1980

The Diary of Joseph Farington RA: Vols V and VI (1 August 1801-31 December 1804) 
edited by Kenneth 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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... critic, even of works he found distasteful. When he was in France he joined in the execration of David expressed by most British artists. They found it unthinkable that a regicide could be a good painter, and preferred minor figures such as Guérin and Gérard to the great master of French Neo-classicism. Yet Farington could still pinpoint the salient ...

Second World War-Game

Douglas Johnson, 22 May 1980

1943: The victory that never was 
by John Grigg.
Eyre Methuen, 255 pp., £7.95, April 1980, 9780413396105
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... the plans for a landing in France that were being prepared by a British Chief of Staff, General F.E. Morgan, were being questioned severely by most of the senior officers at British Home Headquarters, for whom the whole enterprise represented an undue risk. As the American Secretary for the Army, Henry Stimson, put it, ‘the shadows of Passchendaele and ...

Gay’s the word

Hugo Williams, 6 November 1980

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America 
by Edmund White.
Deutsch, 336 pp., £5.95, August 1980, 9780233973012
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... and is now shrinking to its original membership (who are breathing sighs of relief). It came in on David Bowie and glam-rock, unisex, disco and women’s lib, short hair and Andy Warhol. Kids arriving in New York from the outback needed a quick code to bridge the gap from hick to sophisticate. Greyhound got them to the bus station and Gay took them on from ...

Donne’s Reputation

Sarah Wintle, 20 November 1980

English Renaissance Studies 
edited by John Carey.
Oxford, 320 pp., £15, March 1980, 0 19 812093 1
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... John Donne, and was seized upon by a readership anxious to stress the degeneracy of their own age. David Jones, an autochthonous Welsh, rather than Anglo-American, modernist of Poundian tendencies, offers another poet’s version of Johnson’s aperçu in his preface to the Anathemata (1952), and claims the Metaphysicals for Wales at the same time. Jones is ...

Funnies

Caroline Moorehead, 5 February 1981

Siege! Princes Gate 
by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ Team.
Hamlyn, 131 pp., May 1980, 0 600 20337 9
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Siege: Six Days at the Iranian Embassy 
by George Brock.
Macmillan, 144 pp., £1.95, May 1980, 0 333 30951 0
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Who dares wins 
by Tony Geraghty.
Arms and Armour, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 9780853684572
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... urban counter-terrorist force does not make edifying reading. In 1941, a subaltern in the Guards, David Stirling, fighting Rommel in the Western Desert, decided that what the campaign needed was guerrilla tactics: small units of highly-trained commandos striking by stealth. After the war, the skills of the first Special Air Service were transferred to the ...

Goethe In Britain

Rosemary Ashton, 19 March 1981

Goethe’s Plays 
translated by Charles Passage.
Benn, 626 pp., £12.95, July 1980, 0 510 00087 8
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The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 
by T.J. Reed.
Croom Helm, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1979, 0 85664 356 4
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Goethe on Art 
translated by John Gage.
Scolar, 251 pp., £10, March 1980, 0 85967 494 0
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The Younger Goethe and the Visual Arts 
by W.D. Robson-Scott.
Cambridge, 175 pp., £19.50, February 1981, 0 521 23321 6
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... his teacher, Oeser, the mannerist classicism of Fuseli and Girodet, and the realist classicism of David. Goethe, for long a serious and mediocre painter, was a better critic than he was a theorist. Against the arid connoisseurship of the proselytising essays in his periodical Propyläen – too conscious an attempt to educate public taste – the essays on ...

Mad or bad?

Michael Ignatieff, 18 June 1981

Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials 
by Roger Smith.
Edinburgh, 288 pp., £15, March 1981, 9780852244074
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... treatment and the public discourse has already been charted by Andrew Scull, Michel Foucault and David Rothman. Roger Smith’s contribution is to show that the legal conceptions of mens rea and free will provided the basis for resisting medical claims to hegemoney, not only within the courtroom, but in ‘public opinion’ at large. The ...

Putting down

Emma Rothschild, 4 June 1981

The Zero-Sum Society 
by Lester Thurow.
Harper and Row, 230 pp., £7.95, February 1981, 0 465 09384 1
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... jobs and food, but excluding Social Security, Medicaid and unemployment insurance). To this Mr David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (who found the book about single men so Promethean) responds with optimism. Of 16.5 million poor people (living on less than $12,600 a year for a family of four), only ‘47 per cent would suffer a ...

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: On Dora Carrington, 3 April 2025

... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...

Diary

Keiron Pim: In Mostyska, 22 February 2024

... home, which faced the marketplace where his family were traders. I took a picture of my Star of David necklace against this backdrop, possessed by some primal, spiky urge to reinstate an ephemeral Jewish presence in this town which now has no Jewish community. I walked around the old synagogue, which has been converted into flats, but found no traces of its ...

At the Institut du monde arabe

Josephine Quinn: ‘Trésors sauvés de Gaza’, 9 October 2025

... calm that followed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 had come to an end with the failure of Camp David, Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount and the subsequent Second Intifada. The artefacts could not safely be sent back to Gaza. In 2007 they made it as far as Geneva for an exhibition at the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Gaza at the ...

Don’t we all want to be happy?

Jonathan Coe: Satie against Solemnity, 14 August 2025

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite 
by Ian Penman.
Fitzcarraldo, 213 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 80427 153 7
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... only Rabelais, Flann O’Brien and Spike Milligan, but also – more surprisingly – the likes of David Nobbs, Ken Dodd and Les Dawson. (The middle part of the book consists of a kind of Flaubertian dictionary, a ‘Satie A-Z’, and it’s pleasing to note that of the two Leses on offer, Les Dawson has a much longer entry than Les Six.) Satie as a Gallic ...

Existence Unperceived

W.D. Hart, 15 October 1981

Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.F. Strawson 
edited by Zak van Straaten.
Oxford, 302 pp., £12.50, November 1980, 9780198246039
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... papers in Philosophical Subjects. For some time, John Searle has been in the business of refuting David Hume’s thesis that purely normative or evaluative claims cannot be derived from purely factual claims. This has generated a certain amount of argument in the journals. Jaakko Hintikka is one of Searle’s critics. In ‘Prima-Facie Obligations’, Searle ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: New New Grub Street, 3 February 1983

... him, too, for his lovable obsessions – with Barbara Woodhouse, with Sue-Ellen’s mouth, with David Vine, and with all things Japanese – and for his willingness to admit that vulgar stuff is best watched fairly vulgarly: ‘You would have to be dead not to be thrilled to bits by her.’ There is a good joke about every fifth page of this volume, and the ...