Sergeant Jones’s Sleeping-Bag

Michael Ignatieff, 17 July 1997

Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture 
by Elaine Showalter.
Picador, 244 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 330 34670 9
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... which can enlist the sympathy and attention of medical practitioners. A syndrome offers those who may be having a hard time the validation of the victim’s role. Validation seems to be the key here – and it is Showalter’s attack on their system of inner validation which makes chronic fatigue syndrome sufferers so angry with her. If chronic fatigue ...

Death to America Day

Roger Hardy, 15 September 1988

Europe and the Mystique of Islam 
by Maxime Rodinson, translated by Roger Veinus.
Tauris, 163 pp., £19.50, April 1988, 1 85043 104 3
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The Political Language of Islam 
by Bernard Lewis.
Chicago, 168 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 226 47692 8
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Islam and Revolution in the Middle East 
by Henry Munson.
Yale, 180 pp., £15.95, June 1988, 0 300 04127 6
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... Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in Frankfurt. The prospect of an end to the Gulf War may ease Muslim anger but is unlikely to end it. It sometimes seems that militant Islam was spawned by Ayatollah Khomeini, and hence that it is no more than a decade old. But the ‘crisis of Islam’ has much deeper roots, though Khomeini’s Islamic revolution ...

Last Days of the American Empire

Philip Towle, 19 May 1988

Armageddon? Essays 1983-1987 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 244 pp., £11.95, November 1987, 9780233981567
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Empire 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 587 pp., £11.95, November 1987, 0 233 98152 7
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The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 
by Paul Kennedy.
Unwin Hyman, 677 pp., £18.95, March 1988, 0 04 909019 4
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... advice to Britain – which explains much of the book’s popularity inside the USA, and which may cause problems to those accustomed to ‘consume’ American supplies of security. It is easy for many Americans to overlook Kennedy’s wise warnings on the dangerous and destabilising effects of too quickly shrugging off external obligations once ...

Modernity

George Steiner, 5 May 1988

Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early 20th-century Europe 
edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier.
Manchester, 328 pp., £29.50, February 1988, 0 7190 2260 6
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... cars out of those two decades have become emblematic of a lost nerve and ostentatious brio. There may be pretty obvious reasons for this mode. Our bourses and currencies are haunted by intimations of the previous crash and of the turmoil and recession which ensued. Our sense of the inward connections between the two world wars and of the decline of Europe ...

Mix ’n’ match

Roy Porter, 19 January 1989

The Essential Book of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Vol. I: Theory 
by Liu Yanchi, translated by Fang Tingyu and Chen Laidi.
Columbia, 305 pp., $40, April 1988, 9780231061964
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The Essential Book of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Vol. II: Clinical Practice 
by Liu Yanchi, translated by Fang Tingyu and Chen Laidi.
Columbia, 479 pp., £80, April 1988, 0 231 06518 3
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Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China 
by Nathan Sivin.
University of Michigan Centre for Chinese Studies, 549 pp., $22.50, September 1987, 0 89264 073 1
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... healing to standardised diagnostics, and drug therapeutics, traditional Chinese medicine, it may be argued, gives priority to the unique concatenation of circumstances producing sickness in the individual, and cultivates treatments which are less specifics against disease (the pill for the ill) than a means of fortifying the sick individual’s ...

Diary

John Sutherland: Sad Professor, 18 February 1999

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture 
by Roger Scruton.
Duckworth, 152 pp., £14.95, November 1998, 0 7156 2870 4
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... with the disciplines of the 12-step group, he likes to ‘identify’. His current appearance may be an act of identification with PWAs (his equivalent of the red ribbon), with Bosnian refugees, Sudanese famine victims or Jodie Kidd. My reading of Stipe’s prematurely geriatric persona is less cynical. During its heyday in the Eighties, the group was ...

Using the Heavens

John Bossy: Renaissance Astrology, 1 June 2000

Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer 
by Anthony Grafton.
Harvard, 284 pp., £21.95, February 2000, 0 674 09555 3
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... them, he has pursued a roughly Warburgian path of investigating the 16th-century intellect. That may suggest Foucauldian overtones, and indeed we can find him juggling with the master’s Renaissance episteme, the cosmos of resemblances and affinities which was to be superseded in the age of Descartes by a new cosmos of identities and hiatuses. Grafton is ...

Hands Full of Rose Thorns and Fridge Oil

Elizabeth Lowry: ‘Triomf’, 20 January 2000

Triomf 
by Marlene van Niekerk, translated by Leon de Kock.
Little, Brown, 444 pp., £16.99, November 1999, 0 316 85202 3
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... has become the sunny New South Africa, a country against which the rest of the civilised world may once again safely play cricket and where a holiday hardly registers on your credit card. The Anti-Apartheid Organisation has been disbanded. Fergal Keane has packed up his microphone and gone home. In Trafalgar Square, a beaming Nelson Mandela casts a ...

Diary

Anne Sofer: The Silliest Script Ever Written, 1 September 1983

... stuff, socialist realism drama. He is nobody’s idea of a leader. However, my guess is that he may come third. The anger of the hard Left at Kinnock’s failure to vote for Tony Benn for the Deputy Leadership, and his part in blocking Ken Livingstone’s claims to Brent East on the NEC, may attract more votes – in all ...

Inside Hitler

J.P. Stern, 16 February 1984

Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries. The Private Diaries of Dr Theo Morell 
edited by David Irving.
Sidgwick, 309 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 283 98981 5
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... drugs then on the market. Only a quack could have acted the part allotted to him and, whatever he may have been like before he joined Hitler’s ‘court’, Morell conformed as best he could to what was expected: ‘What more natural,’ Mr Irving asks, ‘than that the busy Führer should engage a physician who would work instant “miracle cures” through ...

What can be done

P.F. Strawson, 18 February 1982

Theories and Things 
by W.V. Quine.
Harvard, 219 pp., £8.75, November 1981, 0 674 87925 2
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... many sorts of purported objects that are vague and undefined. The critical, scientific philosopher may be content to leave the common man with his vague and untidy ontology: but for his own purposes, the pursuit of a system of the world which shall be simple, comprehensive and precise, he may revise, curtail or add as he ...

Dreams of Fair Game

George Woodcock, 20 May 1982

Maps and Dreams 
by Hugh Brody.
Jill Norman and Hobhouse, 297 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 906908 76 0
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... essential staple of the local Indian economy. Indeed, Brody conjectures that this corner of Canada may have been the earliest concentration-point for the proto-Indians who made their way from Asia into the new continent, and that the Beavers may therefore be heirs to the oldest continuous hunting economy in the ...

A Spot of Blackmail

Douglas Johnson, 1 July 1982

J’Accuse 
by Graham Greene.
Bodley Head, 69 pp., £1.95, May 1982, 0 370 30930 8
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... is an Emile Zola trying to get out. But whatever the Mayor of Nice, Monsieur Jacques Médecin, may say, this is not the case with Greene. Although he has obviously seen himself in the same light as Zola, to judge by the title of his pamphlet and by references that are in the text, he has recounted a fait divers rather than a cause célèbre. There will be ...

Ruthless Enthusiasms

Michael Ignatieff, 15 July 1982

The Brixton Disorders: Report of an Inquiry by the Rt Hon. the Lord Scarman 
HMSO, 168 pp., £8, November 1981, 0 10 184270 8Show More
Punishment, Danger and Stigma: The Morality of Criminal Justice 
by Nigel Walker.
Blackwell, 206 pp., £9.95, August 1980, 0 631 12542 6
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Punishment: A Philosophical and Criminological Inquiry 
by Philip Bean.
Martin Robertson, 215 pp., £12.50, August 1981, 0 85520 391 9
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Dangerousness and Criminal Justice 
by Jean Floud and Warren Young.
Heinemann, 228 pp., £14.50, October 1981, 0 435 82307 8
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The Abuse of Power: Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom 
by Patricia Hewitt.
Martin Robertson, 295 pp., £15, December 1981, 0 85520 380 3
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... even pushing in the bus queues are assembled together in an ominous chain of signification. These may seem to have common causes, common perpetrators, but their real connections remain obscure. This does not prevent them from being lumped in with terrorism and political assassination as the grist for a historical narrative of decline. Some of the more extreme ...

Ego’s End

John Sturrock, 22 November 1979

Psychoanalytic Politics 
by Sherry Turkle.
Burnett Books/Deutsch, 278 pp., £6.95
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... questions Ms Turkle puts to herself. 1968 is the cardinal date in her narrative, and the events of May of that year. That blissful if generally unproductive hiatus in the political life of France has been required to explain rather too much of what has happened in the country since: it is in danger of growing into the creation-myth of present-day France. But ...