I told you so!

James Davidson: Oracles, 2 December 2004

The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles 
by Michael Wood.
Chatto, 271 pp., £17.99, January 2004, 0 7011 6546 4
Show More
Show More
... sense of something that Cicero in De Divinatione considered the big issue: god/s. An author as self-conscious as Wood is, of course, by no means innocent of the possibility of his own oracularity qua author, which serves nicely to ironise the quantity of erudite, esoteric allusion, alternately formal and familiar, which will for many readers be the most ...

Jack and Leo

John Sutherland, 27 July 1989

The Letters of Jack London 
edited by Earle Labor, Robert Leitz and Milo Shepard.
Stanford, 1657 pp., $139.50, October 1988, 0 8047 1227 1
Show More
Tolstoy 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 572 pp., £16.95, May 1988, 0 241 12190 6
Show More
Show More
... Charmian (an ‘infantile’ mate-woman, as Stone portrayed her), and ultimately to suicide from a self-administered overdose of morphine. Stone based his suicide thesis on interviews and on some alleged notes by the dying man’s bed. ‘Uremia’, Stone alleged, was a cover-up by Charmian and her pliant doctors. Stone’s Sailor on Horseback remains both ...

Histories of Australia

Stuart Macintyre, 28 September 1989

The Oxford History of Autralia. Vol III: 1860-1900 
by Beverley Kingston.
Oxford, 368 pp., £22.50, July 1989, 0 19 554611 3
Show More
The Road from Coorain: An Australian Memoir 
by Jill Ker Conway.
Heinemann, 238 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 434 14244 1
Show More
A Secret Country 
by John Pilger.
Cape, 286 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 224 02600 3
Show More
Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past 
edited by Stephen Nicholas.
Cambridge, 246 pp., $45, June 1989, 0 521 36126 5
Show More
Show More
... Australia, created by a Labor government ‘to help the sons and daughters of the working man’), self-education (he called his intellectual autobiography A blacksmith looks at a university) and afforestation. Three of his children passed through the University but the fourth struggled at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a ...

Making sentences

Philip Horne, 21 November 1991

The Jameses: A Family Narrative 
by R.W.B. Lewis.
Deutsch, 696 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 233 98748 7
Show More
Meaning in Henry James 
by Millicent Bell.
Harvard, 384 pp., £35.95, October 1991, 9780674557628
Show More
Show More
... came to nothing in their idleness. Henry Senior’s passionate filial revolt against the ruthless self-interest embodied by William of Albany continued in the mystical-theological sphere, where he had an eccentric angle pretty much to himself – which at least gave him a lifetime’s driven work. It greatly helps The Jameses to hang together, as it helped ...

Lions, Princes, Bosses

R.W. Johnson, 15 August 1991

... lights and the more ambitious cadres were heavily besuited, as betokens the new ruling class they self-consciously aspire to be. Nelson Mandela was shocked to see T-shirted drivers chauffeuring VIPs like himself and immediately prescribed collars and ties. Adelaide Tambo and Winnie Mandela vied with one another in the extravagance of the traditional African ...

All the Russias

J. Arch Getty, 30 August 1990

Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR 
by Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda.
Hamish Hamilton, 432 pp., £20, May 1990, 0 241 12540 5
Show More
Show More
... in school. The Bolshevik platform before the Russian Revolution had stressed national rights and self-determination, and many non-Russian radicals such as Stalin were attracted to Lenin’s group for this reason. The early Bolshevik leaderships included large numbers of Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Balts, Jews and others. Immediately after taking ...

By the Roots

Jeremy Waldron, 9 February 1995

The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism 
by Stephen Holmes.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, November 1993, 0 674 03180 6
Show More
Show More
... whose work has done more perhaps than any of the others’ to shake the coherence and conscious self-certainty of the modern liberal self. The omission of Marx and Lenin is a different matter. Holmes is quite explicit about the need to establish a distinct category of ‘non-Marxist anti-liberalism’ and I think he is ...

Once upon a Real Time

Wendy Doniger, 23 March 1995

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers 
by Marina Warner.
Chatto, 458 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 7011 3530 1
Show More
Show More
... told in group settings which diffuse the sense of dange’ and guilt (a bit like contemporary self-help support groups). Bruno Bettelheim noted (in The Uses of Enchantment) the comfort that even a solitary telling can bring to a child who realises that other people have told and heard the tale and, presumably, have also experienced the threatening ...

Contra Mundum

Edward Said, 9 March 1995

Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 
by Eric Hobsbawm.
Joseph, 627 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 7181 3307 2
Show More
Show More
... the world. Yet the growth of the historian’s mind, so to speak, never reduces itself to tiresome self-contemplation. On the contrary, Hobsbawm’s solutions to the problems of his own epistemology become part of his quest for knowledge. This emergent global consciousness is at its most memorable in the opening of The Age of Empire, where he records the ...

Let them cut grass

Linda Colley, 16 December 1993

The Downing Street Years 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 914 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 255049 0
Show More
Show More
... of being an outsider, and this was the key to her success. Being female was part of the parvenu self-image but so, too, was being lower middle-class: ‘In the eyes of the “wet” Tory establishment I was not only a woman, but “that woman”, someone not just of a different sex, but of a different class, a person with an alarming conviction that the ...

Dark Strangers, Gorgeous Slums

Philip Horne, 16 March 1989

Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Bloomsbury, 193 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0011 8
Show More
The Marble Mountain, and Other Stories 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 126 pp., £10.95, January 1989, 9780224025973
Show More
The Bathroom 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Barbara Bray.
Boyars, 125 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7145 2880 3
Show More
Motherland 
by Timothy O’Grady.
Chatto, 230 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3341 4
Show More
A Lesser Dependency 
by Peter Benson.
Macmillan, 146 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 333 49093 2
Show More
Show More
... in an inflationary style of uneasy melodramatic overstatement which veers between confession and self-justification. The tone sometimes becomes strenuously entertaining, as when ‘the trains quicken, and the plot thickens,’ or when a beautiful young Greek proposes to her on an acquaintance of a few hours, and she locks herself in a ship’s ...

Goodbye to Mahfouz

Edward Said, 8 December 1988

... existing in 1948, and was reborn on 15 November 1988, the second a country that began its public self-destruction in April 1975, and has not stopped. In both polities there are and have been people whose national identity is threatened with extinction (the former) or with daily dissolution (the latter). In such societies the novel is both a risky and a ...

Old Gravy

Mark Ford, 7 September 1995

Robert Graves: Life on the Edge 
by Miranda Seymour.
Doubleday, 524 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 385 40423 9
Show More
Robert Graves and the White Goddess 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 618 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 297 81534 2
Show More
Robert Graves: His Life and Work 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Bloomsbury, 600 pp., £25, June 1995, 0 7475 2205 7
Show More
Robert Graves: Collected Writings on Poetry 
edited by Paul O’Prey.
Carcanet, 560 pp., £35, June 1995, 1 85754 172 3
Show More
Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems 
edited by Patrick Quinn.
Carcanet, 160 pp., £15.95, April 1995, 9781857541267
Show More
Show More
... sexual unease is one of the dominant themes of Goodbye to All That, a book that charts as self-consciously as, say, To the Lighthouse, the transition from Victorianism to modernity. Given his period and class, Graves’s arrested development sounds standard enough, but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ...
The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe 
edited by George Holmes.
Oxford, 398 pp., £17.50, March 1988, 0 19 820073 0
Show More
A History of 12th-century Western Philosophy 
edited by Peter Dronke.
Cambridge, 495 pp., £37.50, April 1988, 0 521 25896 0
Show More
The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.1450 
edited by J.H. Burns.
Cambridge, 808 pp., £60, May 1988, 0 521 24324 6
Show More
Medieval Popular Culture: Problem of Belief and Perception 
by Aron Gurevich, translated by Janos Bak and Paul Hollingsworth.
Cambridge, 275 pp., £27.50, May 1988, 0 521 30369 9
Show More
A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World 
edited by George Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Harvard, 650 pp., £24.95, April 1988, 0 674 39976 5
Show More
Show More
... likely to talk than his brother was. And the whole scene betrays an intense cultural delight in self-control, impassivity, grinning in the face of torture. But how did this sort of thing work through to a rank-and-file member of a Viking army (or come to that to a ‘royal Scandinavian general’, to use James’s phrase for the sons of Ragnar ...

Doing something

John Dunn, 17 March 1988

Politics: A Work of Constructive Social Theory 
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £25, January 1988, 0 521 32974 4
Show More
The Critical Legal Studies Movement 
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Harvard, 128 pp., £15.25, October 1986, 0 674 17735 5
Show More
W.A. Mozart: ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ 
by Tim Carter.
Cambridge, 180 pp., £27.50, February 1988, 0 521 30267 6
Show More
Show More
... the end more of a failure than it is a triumph. But in the face of the spiteful scorn of the more self-consciously temperate members of the academy, it is in many ways a magnificent – even an enviable – failure. Like Rousseau, Unger thinks well of the potentialities of virtually every human being (at least at some stage in their lives), but poorly of ...