Sleepless Afternoons

Avi Shlaim, 25 February 1993

The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel 
byGeorge Ball and Douglas Ball.
Norton, 382 pp., £17.95, January 1993, 0 393 02933 6
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... a reluctant concession to us.’ A typical example of the way Israel exploits America is provided by the saga of the Lavi aircraft. To secure American agreement to this hare-brained project in 1982, Israel assured America that the planes would be solely for Israeli use. Yet early the following year the Israeli Aircraft ...

School of Hard Knocks

Peter Campbell, 2 December 1993

The Materials of Sculpture 
byNicholas Penny.
Yale, 318 pp., £35, November 1993, 0 300 05556 0
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... so on. The other takes it towards material for material’s sake, towards the pebble which lives by its pebble-ish nature alone. Nicholas Penny’s book shows how these forces are reconciled. Materials bring meanings with them. Not even the most resonantly-named dyes and pigments (‘vermilion’, ‘ultramarine’, ‘indigo’) carry as much baggage as ...

Downward Mobility

Linda Colley, 4 May 1989

The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians 
edited byJohn Cannon, R.H.C. Davis, William Doyle and Jack Greene.
Blackwell, 480 pp., £39.95, September 1988, 9780631147084
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Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 
byPatricia Craddock.
Johns Hopkins, 432 pp., £19, February 1989, 0 8018 3720 0
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Gibbon: Making History 
byRoy Porter.
Palgrave, 187 pp., £14.95, February 1989, 0 312 02728 1
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Macaulay 
byOwen Dudley Edwards.
Trafalgar Square, 160 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 9780297794684
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Acton 
byHugh Tulloch.
Trafalgar Square, 144 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 297 79470 1
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... the growing trend among both politicians and academics to prescribe what historical study should be: how it should be organised and conducted, what it should be about, why it should be pursued at all. Such prescriptions can sometimes stem from genuine ...

Murder in the Cathedral

Anthony Howard, 7 December 1989

The Crockford’s File: Gareth Bennett and the Death of the Anglican Mind 
byWilliam Oddie.
Hamish Hamilton, 232 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 241 12613 4
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Absent Friends 
byGeoffrey Wheatcroft.
Hamish Hamilton, 291 pp., £15.95, November 1989, 0 241 12874 9
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... the recent meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking against an amendment urging the Church to delay re-submitting its Clergy (Ordination) Measure to Parliament until ‘after the next Parliamentary General Election’. The point at issue concerned not ...

What time is it?

Michael Wood, 16 February 1989

Dreams of Roses and Fire 
byEyvind Johnson, translated byErik Friis.
Dedalus, 384 pp., £11.95, December 1988, 0 946626 40 5
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Women in a River Landscape 
byHeinrich Böll, translated byDavid McLintock.
Secker, 208 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 436 05460 4
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The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman 
byAldo Busi, translated byRaymond Rosenthal.
Faber, 430 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 571 14657 0
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... age – but all ages are insane, he would say – and offers not hope but whatever comfort is to be found in lucidity and scepticism. Johnson was born in 1900 and died in 1976; he won the Nobel Prize in 1974. He edited an underground magazine in Sweden during the Second World War, but lived in France and Germany for much of his life. Part of his novel is ...

Monster Doss House

Iain Sinclair, 24 November 1988

The Grass Arena 
byJohn Healy.
Faber, 194 pp., £9.95, October 1988, 0 571 15170 1
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... me dizzy.’ Brooding malign silences wind the tension to breaking point, and are punctuated by sudden eruptions of violence: it is a survivalist world, bleak and uncompromising – the world of competitive chess. John Healy arrived there, without papers or proof of identity, a drowning man coming up for the last time. It was his only way of escaping ...

Post-Modernism and the Law

Robert Post, 21 February 1991

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks 
byPeter Goodrich.
Weidenfeld, 353 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 297 82024 9
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Post-Modern Law: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Death of Man 
edited byAnthony Carty.
Edinburgh, 166 pp., £25, August 1990, 0 7486 0156 2
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... like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its operation, but ...

How smart was Poussin?

Malcolm Bull, 4 April 1991

Nicolas Poussin 
byAlain Mérot, translated byFabia Claris.
Thames and Hudson, 336 pp., £65, November 1990, 0 300 04763 0
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Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting 
byOskar Bätschmann, translated byMarko Daniel.
Reaktion, 176 pp., £27, September 1990, 0 948462 10 8
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Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain 
byMargaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf.
Yale, 256 pp., £35, November 1990, 0 300 04763 0
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... have almost all endorsed this view, and the history of Poussin’s critical fortunes can be read as an elaboration of the sculptor’s telling gesture. The 17th-century critic Bellori noted that Poussin had the ‘most prized gifts of intelligence’. A few years later, the Comte de Brienne said of him that he ‘was endowed with a great deal of ...

The point of it all

Asa Briggs, 25 April 1991

The Pencil: A History 
byHenry Petroski.
Faber, 434 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 571 16182 0
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... 1859, was ‘an excursus in technology’, and he went on to survey all kinds of pens including, by a convenient extension of the word ‘pen’, ‘printer’s type, the pen of civilisation’, ‘the electric telegraph, the world’s shorthand pen’, and the chisel, ‘by which cathedrals and Sebastopols are written in ...

Where Colombia screwed up

Roger Garfitt, 13 June 1991

... I replied. ‘Oh, Christ!’ she said, and handed it straight back, as if it might still be charged with danger. I have spent much of my time in Colombia over the last five years. Only once have I experienced anything like danger. It was during the Drug War, when a bomb went off in the next street. I had called at a friend’s flat to collect ...

Progress Past

Paul Langford, 8 November 1990

The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain 
byDavid Spadafora.
Yale, 464 pp., £22.50, July 1990, 0 300 04671 5
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George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron 
byVincent Carretta.
Georgia, 389 pp., £38.50, June 1990, 0 8203 1146 4
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... in its own destiny in this respect. Its peculiar saving mission, that of liberating mankind by means of the creation of wealth, would make little sense without some underlying faith in the prospect, perhaps even the certainty, of limitless improvement. The author of The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain, an interesting and carefully crafted ...

Cowboy Coups

Phillip Knightley, 10 October 1991

Smear! Wilson and the Secret State 
byStephen Dorrill and Robin Ramsay.
Fourth Estate, 502 pp., £20, August 1991, 9781872180687
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... In the summer of 1975 I was invited by a man I knew had contacts in MI5 to have lunch at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge. He wanted me to meet ‘someone from the office’ who had a story which might interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion ...

Where mine is at

Gordon Burn, 28 May 1992

Outerbridge Reach 
byRobert Stone.
Deutsch, 409 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 223 98774 3
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... the Merry Pranksters; and Stone both figures in the narrative of Acid Test and is acknowledged by Wolfe in his Author’s Note: ‘There were several excellent writers, in addition to Kesey, who were involved in the Prankster saga ... Robert Stone told me a great deal about Kesey’s fugitive days in Mexico.’ The stake-out that forms the climax of Dog ...

Diary

Linda Colley: Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas, 19 December 1991

... bowling alley. In fact, like most of the present-day Yale campus, it was built in the Thirties by poorly-paid Italian immigrants. Unlike the surrounding buildings, however, which are now beginning to show their real as distinct from their fake age, the Law School is in that pristine state of repair which betokens the support of serious money. For this is ...

All the difference

Avi Shlaim, 25 June 1992

The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations 
byItamar Rabinovich.
Oxford, 259 pp., £19.50, December 1991, 0 19 506066 0
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... The 40th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1988 was accompanied by the publication of a number of books which critically re-examined various aspects of what Israelis call their War of Independence. The authors of these books – Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and myself – are sometimes collectively referred to as the ‘new historians’ or the ‘Israeli revisionists ...